


Night unto Night

by archea2



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Family, First Time, Fix-It, Forgiveness, Groundhog Day, M/M, Reboot, Romance, Sibling Incest, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, briefly dubconny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:59:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6128434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the "Brave New World" finale, while Peter battles Samuel, Hiro bends space and time a little too strongly... and Peter finds himself trapped in a time loop that starts at the Coyote Sands Café, minutes only before Nathan runs off to confront Sylar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A latecomer's gift to fandom and Petrellicest, hoping - like Peter - that it's still not too late. The fic is complete and will be updated twice a week. If you ever wanted to see S4 rebooted, now is your chance!
> 
> A word about the "briefly dubconny" tag. In all of his interactions with Peter, Nathan will never do anything he does not want to. The same goes for Peter. But... Peter won't be entirely honest at first about what they're doing and what they've done before, hence the tag.

It — whatever it is — comes in a flash, a hard-pressed beat of _what the hell_.

And hell is nothing like the hothouse of Peter’s catechism years, nor the no-man’s-New York that catches up with him in his worst hours. At this hour, hell is earth digging a grave at Peter’s feet; hell is a Ferris wheel on the loose, about to tip over and dig all of them further in.

Outside, past his own curtain of hair and the flap of Samuel Sullivan’s tent, heroes are hero-ing. But Peter is too busy manning his own model earthquake to take notice. Claire is here with Noah; Peter can only trust that something is being done to rescue the innocents while he matches Samuel’s moves, wooing the earth into an unsteady dome between them.

Then Bennet calls an order, his voice a trail of sanity across Sullivan’s raving of _your brother_.

And power answers the call. Unearthly, seeping then surging into the tent, and Peter can feel it circling ( _the wheel_ ) him inevitably a moment before it pounces and seizes and hurls him out of consciousness. For one tremendous pulse, Peter and earth become one, rotating in space and spiraling in time; his lungs filled with the smell of grit ( _sand_ ) turned inside out ( _if you want answers_ ), before he is falling ( _your brother_ ) struggling in every direction for something to cling to ( _brother_ ), to embrace ( _Nathan_ ), and the power, massed and fast-moving, takes him down and down to…

Suddenly, the dark waves part. There is a hard surface under Peter’s feet and his rump, as solid as the cool horizontal surface on which the palms of his hands are resting. He blinks three or four _what_ in a row. The space around him is still dim-lit, still shot with fluorescent reds and blues. But...this is another penumbra. Without the cloying notes of cotton candy and popcorn, before the loamier scent of earth took over Peter’s senses. In fact, the dark here smells of...

...burger and fries. On a table for four. His elbows are resting on its faux marble, an inch away from hitting on the ketchup. Peter blinks faster.

There is no outdoor view because the blinds are already down in the Coyote Sands diner. There’s a white-and-black chequered floor, and white paper napkins stacked in a metal container on their table. A clock on the left wall, its round face showing the time to be eight fifteen. Claire, seated by his side. A television screen facing Claire. The bulky presence eating a fry quizzically is Noah Bennet.

And there, coming into sharp view with his arm around their mother and the clothes he died in, is Nathan.

Peter feels a pang, a panic. A jolt of thick shock, stomping his brain before it can be registered as joy; before Peter’s memory kicks in, helping him to the now familiar truth of time travel. Because he has travelled before, but always to the future; never to a time when there are red curtains before him framing a red _EXIT_  sign, a red plastic straw stuck in his milkshake, but Nathan’s neck is bronzed and whole above the collar of his road jacket.

Peter stares, his head swirled between _yes_ and _no_ and the hard flashback to Nathan’s flesh latticed with tiny stitches, as if a crown of thorns had slipped down his neck to throttle him. Nathan’s neck. _Nathan!_

Across the table, his mother is saying something about fries, her eyes bright in her haggard face. The thigh fidgeting under the tabletop must be Noah’s. And Claire is staring at him, the appeal loud and clear.

Peter thinks he said something here before. Possibly now. But he can’t take his eyes off Nathan, and when the sinews on Nathan’s neck tense up, a sign that his brother is trying to swallow or readying himself for speech, it becomes — too much. Peter is still choking, but there’s anger and denial and grief and acceptance to speak for him.

“You can’t be here.”   

Nathan looks as if he’s been struck in the face. Hard words, Peter realises too late, grief’s transmitter blurring them into one-sided rejection that draws a small gasp from Claire and an emphatic sigh from Noah, before Nathan opens his mouth. _No, no_ , Peter bracing himself for a gurgle or worse, Sylar’s ugly, cottony drawl. But Nathan’s voice is, _god_ , is all Nathan’s sandpaper tones, and the pain in them too, not going for disguise.

“All right,” Nathan says. He smiles, but the pain sticks to the shadows under his eyes, the darker hazel known as liver- ( _live_ ) brown eyes. And then, like an echo from the Nathan who showed up at Peter's eleventh birthday parties in dress whites, knowing the name of every constellation under the sky: “You have control.”

Peter feels very much not in control.

“You take care,” Nathan tells him, standing before the table as if it held his grand jury. Angela stretches her hand out, but Nathan’s eyes are not on her. “Of them,” he adds quietly, and, when Peter remains still, tries to smile. His hand touches Peter's cheek briefly: a tingle offered and snatched at by Peter's body before his mind can think. “I’m gonna make it easy for you, Pete.”

And just like that, Nathan is turning. Is walking out of the diner in long capable strides, a leader’s pace if his shoulders weren't so bunched under the coarse leather.

“For _God_ ’s sake.” A few patrons crane their necks at Angela’s tones. “You’d think this family had met its grudge quota for the — Peter!”

Helpless yes, lost yes, lethargic no. His chair clatters to the floor as he launches himself in Nathan’s wake. But there in the night, the empty street? No Nathan. Think, Peter admonishes himself. For God’s sake, on the off-chance of God finally living up to his end of the bargain and giving him Nathan back for keeps, think. Already he is up in the sky, swathed by the cold night gusts, racking his brains for a landmark. Washington, yeah, but not Nathan’s office, not if Peter’s little outburst has taken everyone’s minds off the news about another, senatorial tantrum, and this Nathan has no idea that he’s Sylar’s new bait of choice.

But...this Nathan is still desperate to fix things. To “make it easy”, meaning that he is once again taking the hard road to give Peter leverage, meaning that he's flying a beeline to the one figure Nathan can idealize now that Dad is down and God was put out of business by Dr. Zimmerman. The Father of the Country. Who else? The President, who stepped into Dad’s dead shoes the moment Nathan needed a new role model, the only man who can put things straight, now, in his distressed mind. Fix Peter’s pardon, whatever the cost for Nathan.

Morning is at its peak when Peter finally lands on the private patio to the Oval Office. He’s a sore sight for eyes, his lip bleeding from the air friction and his hands and knees roughened. Peter is still a novice at hovercraft landings, and this one tipped him right into President Worf’s Peruvian lilies.

“I’m Nathan Petrelli’s brother,” he snarls at the wide-eyed Praetorian guard. Surprisingly, they lower their rifles. “Take me to him.”

“...Pete?”

“Nathan,” Peter says, biting on his torn lip to hold another pain in. Everything else is spilling out in a messy mantra— _you’re here and it’s all easy now, Nathan, God exists, I can’t if you’re not, Nathan, ah, Nathan..._ He strains on the guard’s arms, tangled into his at his back, wondering why Nathan’s are still slack at his sides. “Nathan?”

“Peter.” Nathan is smiling now, his upper lip stretched out like a shark’s dorsal fin, his teeth glaring in the sun. “I’m a little busy here.”

President Worf is still scanning Peter’s frazzled form.

“Petrelli, are you sure that’s him? What with the other...”

“Oh, there’s always a way to tell,” Nathan says, and blinks at Peter mockingly. “Clever fellows, these shapeshifters. But clumsy, clumsy. There was one just now, Peter, impersonating me. Funny how the Gestalt sticks even after death—not that you’d know, of course. Wanna see him, little brother?”

And Nathan bends to his brother’s ear, brushing the tip with his lips. Peter holds stock-still.

“No, perhaps not. Shhh, Pete, it's all right. He wasn’t doing a very convincing job of it. Just kept mumbling your name, the fool. Didn’t seem to have any idea you’re number one on my Most Wanted list.”

Sylar smiles, every teeth in the open, the signal for horror. But this is when the scene starts to wobble, the sun to darken, and Peter briefly wonders if he is fainting as he turns in the grip of the tide and dark morphs into night, and a dim hum of voices in his ears, and…

 

* * *

 

...in the diner, in the night, Nathan is walking their mother back to her seat.

Peter stares. But there’s no room for doubt, not even a floater or two dancing before his eyes: his sight is clear, and here’s the face that once launched a thousand fundraisers. A little crumpled, a bit gritty with sweat and concern, but absolutely Nathan—and with that, something warm and wet fills Peter’s chest.

They have almost reached Angela’s chair when Peter walks to them, pulls Nathan’s arm from his brother’s protective stance and wraps it around himself. When his own arms rise to embrace Nathan, and Nathan, slowly, with agonizing caution, begins to reciprocate, Peter abandons his weight to the hug.  

“Peter, what—”

“Boys.” Angela, trying to sound her crisp fond self. “You two have found your moment, good. But please. _Pas devant_.”

Peter lifts his head just enough to bump it softly to the dip in Nathan’s temple.

“Told you,” Claire mouthes around her burger. “Second chances? Never get old.”

But Nathan, his mother’s son, is pulling back. People are in fact clapping from one or two nearby tables because this is Arizona, where virile emotion has retained its audience appeal ever since O. K. Corral. It doesn’t help that Nathan is looking utterly baffled.

“I… I thought you hated the living sight of me?”

And Peter, choking at the beloved voice, finally gets it. Whatever it was that happened outside of Sullivan’s tent, when the Bennets took up the savior business for a change, must have pissed off the time-space continuum mightily. As result, the continuum has sent Peter to a rehab time cell. Or loop, where time can squeeze itself into Nathan’s last hours and force Peter to relive them on a run, a hellish brand of Purgatory. Unless...unless Peter does something about it?

“No,” he all but growls to Nathan, while the sum of him whispers _yes_ to time’s challenge.

Nathan finally looks up, and Peter watches the glint in his eyes firm up: the responsibility junkie’s comeback. His suspicions increase when Nathan zips up his jacket in one virile gesture.

“Pete.” The virile plea comes next. “I swear to you, I’ll take ownership for…”

“ _No_!” Peter growls. He grabs Nathan’s shoulders and quickly shifts his weight to push on them downward. The nurse’s sleight of hand, always handy when Peter needs to ground his fly-by-night brother.

“You want forgiveness? You want family? Then you don’t get to run away from them. Okay? And you, there, turn down that crap!” The clapping has subsided, although people are still staring, and the television program can be heard babbling about homeland security—clearing the way for the impostor, his lockjawed smile and his venomous words.

“Whoa, buster.” The café’s owner sidles up to them, flapping up his apron before him like a white flag. “Sorry I could only give you a cheese’n cheese, but if you’re heading for trouble...”

“Nah, turn it off,” one of the men at the bar says. His neighbours grunt approval: clearly, the votes are for the local free-show over the squabbling politicos. With a shrug, Owner flicks the remote to the sports channel and mutes the sound. It’s sumo wrestling, but nobody seems to mind.

If he had any hopes of Peter piping down, they are quickly dashed. It takes another five minutes to get Nathan to sit down properly, and that’s when Noah mentions Sylar and his opinion that Sylar’s death is about as bona fide as the vanilla base in his shake. When he adds that Sylar and Danko might well be in cahoots, and there’s no saying what their plans might entail, Nathan’s face turns a paler olive and Peter finds himself at his wits’ ends.

“Call Liam,” he blurts out on a snap decision. Nathan starts; Angela, wiping her fingers daintily, turns her gaze on her firstborn.

“Liam Samuels,” Peter insists. “The President’s chief of staff. Tell him we have a situation and Worf had better go incommunicado. See no evil, hear no evil, speak to nobody for the next hours”—memory strikes—“oh, and that includes Liam.”

“And you think he’ll take my word for White House gospel?”

“’Course he will. He’s your best friend.” Peter spreads his hands, taking the burgers as witnesses. “Always rambling about how you and he survived boarding school together, and—”

“ _Survive_ is one word for it,” Angela says, stopping Peter dead in track while a healthy flush creeps up Nathan’s face again.

Everyone else blinks.

“You’re bi?” Claire asks helpfully, ignoring Noah’s eloquent signal across the table. “How’s that for cool? Now you can be my bi-o-dad!”

“That’s…very twenty-first century of you, Claire-Bear.” Noah’s face is back to poker. “But we have more pressing issues to settle.”

“I’ll call him.” Nathan, still hot in the cheeks, rises. Peter’s eyes follow him as far as the gents, which probably double as the phone recess. This should take care of the situation for tonight, with Nathan and the President each stored in a safety bubble. But it doesn’t explain the cloudy rush of emotions in Peter’s head, the misty unease, the outrage, the…grudge. _Liam Samuels?_

“I never liked the boy,” Angela says as if she’d read his mind. “Nathan was such a sap at eighteen. Secret meetings behind the school tennis court, if you please. Love notes under his dorm mattress. Of course it was only a matter of weeks before the staff got wise, and the headmaster saw fit to inform Arthur and Mr Samuels. Believe me, this is one conversation I actually wish had been purged from me.”

Peter struggles to process this while Claire makes a wise comment about Instagram.

“And what came of it?” Noah Bennet, for all his dismissive words, is entranced. Or refueling his blackmail stash. You never can tell with Noah.

“Oh, Arthur made it clear what his son’s... proclivities should be. And lost no time introducing him to, well. Other rites of passage. Nathan proved a quick study, he always does. There was no more nonsense about courting tall, willowy brunets. Or you wouldn’t be here, my dear, to our common loss." Angela smiles over at Claire.

“Okay, can we stop talking about my brother’s sex life behind his back?” His voice more strangled than is common at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Peter soldiers on. “He’s bonding with us now. Again. It’s all that matters tonight.”

Angela does not consider _tonight_.

“You will keep him at our side, then? Work with him? Shield him?” Her dark eyes dig into the very pit of his soul. “Cherish him, even when he’s being a fool? Or his own enemy?”

“Course.” Peter’s eyes signal back their own _what are you on about_. “He’s my brother. I’m not letting him out of my sight again, Mom.”

Her smile is quick, but dazzling. It smacks of Mother-Knows-Best and goals well scored, and her knowing exactly what she was doing, letting that Petrelli cat out of the bag. Peter feels dizzy, and not just from the local smell of charred beef and molten cheese. What’s with him? Her? And Nathan, still excused from the table and whose absence is starting to nag—how long does a private talk with Samuels take, these days?

But while Peter swamps himself in his troubled mind, time’s cogs and wheels are turning. And thus, he does not turn his head when the door opens, and the night ushers in seven or eight men in boots and guns. They could be military or a local posse; Danko’s hounds, if Nathan used his cell phone to reach his Liam and his call was traced back, or the tough end of a call to the Sheriff’s office by a disgruntled café’s owner. There’s no telling from the uniforms since the blue gloom of the diner muffles them to some law-enforcing drab colour.

What turns clear pretty soon is what they’re here for. Voices shoot up; fists are freed, and a sudden move on Claire’s part has one of the men twist his hand into her flaxen hair, jerking her neck back at a sickening angle. Then, the diner explodes. The man tumbles sideways and Noah, who is nothing if not precise-gestured, has grasped the metallic spoon from his glass and is doing something skillful with it and the next man’s eyes.

The crack of the gun crosses paths with Nathan’s shout as he runs back into the room, one arm flung in their direction, palm open. Then Nathan stops, and the last thing Peter sees before the first, merciful wave is Claire’s terrified face and Noah’s body on the floor, blood gushing up from under the knot of his tie and one lens of his glasses all cobwebbed.

The shout fills Peter’s head as as the loop wheels him in, the screams fade off, and…


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Petrelli means Little Peter in Italian.)

The night.

The diner.

The family, once again whole and safe.

Panic melts into relief, fringed with open-mouthed joy. No, death is not the end. Yes, Peter is getting a third chance and counting, four, five, six.... But—a sobering proviso—the continuum won’t let him off on the mere chance that he rescues Nathan. Peter’s mission has been upgraded to something wryly akin to that first, fresh sense of wonder that came with his discovery of _special._ He must save lives, plural. It’s no go if Nathan lives and Noah dies, or anyone else in Peter’s inner circle of friends and allies. The continuum expects Peter to go the whole Peter hog, meaning that he should probably start worrying about Mohinder Suresh, out there covering his curly head with Coyote Sands’ ashes, or his fellow specials in Building 26, or…

Peter stretches out a blind hand. He needs someone to hold it. And tell him that he can do this, can make it through the loop’s implacable agenda. That he...that he can do anything, _anything_ , Pete, and that continuum ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

When his hand is taken and held in solid warmth, Peter gives in. Gives all of himself to the touch, before it gives back a quick prod  of sensation. A tingle, familiar, causing him to him flinch alert and open his eyes again.

He has taken on a new power.

Mom’s hand—oh, yes. Of course. And her face, startled, then watchful as she faces him across the salt pillar and sees him grin down at his palm. Once, in a time still unborn, she called it a curse and begged him not to use it; but now Peter sees it as an exit. A chance that _has_ to be chanced, a ride that _has_ to be ridden—a peep at the future, courtesy of a dream, so he can find out how to leapfrog that infernal loop.

“...someone say something?” Claire asks, pat on cue.

“Me,” Peter cuts in, before Angela can say ‘potato’ or any declination of it. “Because I, I. I got a text from...” What _was_ that kid’s code name? Peter glances distractedly at the book clasped in his mother’s hand. “Rabbit. I mean, Rebel. We gotta go.”

Bennet cocks his head to one side, wise-owl-wise, but keeps mum.

As for Mom, she keeps staring at him. In any other circumstances, Peter would end up mumbling under her gaze, but time is of the essence. And how.

“North is out,” he blurts on. “We’ll be roadblocked every way we go. So, yeah, it’s down the rabbit hole for us. C’mon, everyone, up. Nathan.”

Nathan turns his head, and Peter wonders if he’ll ever get used to it, the handsome features chipped and bruised from the guilt haunting Nathan. “You’re in,” Peter tells him.

“You’re sure?”

“You’re _in_ , Nathan.” Strong words, rough-spoken from the heart before Peter’s mind can gear in. Reaching over the lie of years, reaching out to the boy once dragged to a high-end bordello by Dad and told he had to go deep and clean everything dysfunctional from himself. There’s so much more to Nathan than meets the eye, more than even Peter knew.

“Can you drive us back to Mexico, buddy?”

By now, they’re outside the diner. Noah offers to take the other car and cut his own trail, sweep the dust behind their tire tracks, so to speak. A proposal instantly vetoed by Peter and Claire, who adds that someone has to GPS Nathan before they all end up on the Mississippi Delta. In the end, the Bennets walk off to one car to play pilot fish; Nathan steps round the other on his way to the driver’s seat. Peter reaches for the door on his side only to hear the quiet _click_ of the security lock.

“Show me that text.”

When he doesn’t answer, Peter finds Angela’s hand splayed on his forearm. Not red in claw, but there is no mistaking the strength in these long fingers.

“Which one are you?” She is as tall as her younger son, making it possible for her to look at him full front and inspect his forehead. “And what have you done with Peter? Close your mouth,” she adds without a beat, and Peter almost braces himself for the old childhood reprimand, _We are not a codfish_.

He does not close his mouth. “I’m—one of us, Mom,” he rejoins. “And I’m here because terrible things have been done and I have to do something about them. Just, don’t ask me.” God, no. God, you bastard, don’t let her ask. Not when her lips are still pinched into that thin line between lipstick and repudiation. “Mom, jeez, it’s me. Look at me. Try me.”

She passes a slow, well-groomed finger across his forehead. What she finds in there seems to quieten her:  she releases her grip a second before the door clicks back to open. Nathan is starting the car.

“What do you need?” she asks, a murmur as she slithers into the backseat.

“To move on,” Peter says earnestly. His wish to dream only comes second to his wish to see Coyote Sands, Arizona, squeezed to a mote of dust in the rearview mirror. He braces himself. “And then, to sleep.”

Her sigh is no surprise. Her voice is, loud and clear as the words bounce on the walls of his mind. _Then you had better go and save the_ — _day_. _Day_ is stressed, and Peter wonders if she is trying to tell him something. She was always sparse with clues and caresses, their formidable mother, but this? Could be one, a viaticum to his quest? The reassurance that there is, in fact, a time limit to the loop—that if he can see them safely through to the next evening without any crushing of brother, friend or butterfly, time will uncoil again and all will be well.

As if in synch, the road makes a straight dash into the horizon. The mountains stay away, weaving an endless kilim of desert lavender and mesquite grass between them. A windmill leaps at them, a ghostly reminder of that Ferris wheel not so long ago; Peter winces.

“All right, Pete?”

Peter hears the low-tuned _Are we all right?_  “Yeah,” he says. The road stretches out some more. “No. I gotta sleep.”

“Sure. You sit back and do just that.” Nathan’s voice is rasp with exhaustion, but his touch to the wheel remains firm. Nathan learnt to steer before he was taught to speak, Peter thinks, his parents’ premium on the Bonds of Power. “I have Bennet in my headlights. We’re not gonna lose them, Peter.”

Peter looks at the moon-and-shadow scenery. “What if we are?”

A patch of warmth on his thigh, a light squeeze—Nathan’s hand.

“Then he’ll have to channel his inner Smiley and track us.”

And suddenly, just like that, they’re chuckling. Because yeah, if anyone looks like he’s been born and raised in a vintage Le Carré novel, that would be Noah Bennet. Nathan smiles and Peter laughs on, marveling at the warm vibe of it as he leans back against the rigid headrest. The tight band around his throat is looser, dissolving into a yawn. “Thanks,” Peter whispers, closing his eyes.

He gives his thoughts a slack rein, lets them flit to the windmill and the wheel, and a story he once read with a merry-go-round that could whirl people back and forth in time, and what Nathan was like at eighteen. Taller than tall, yeah, with a rougher cheek when he gave Peter that coveted goodnight kiss (Dad disapproved). Peter’s thoughts flutter over the kiss, then away, back to Nathan standing with a willowy lad, both dark-haired, holding each other in the rain as they take cover under a tree. The scene is filled with storm light and—Peter makes out the soggy tennis court behind them—a degree of phantasmal precision which comes only in the thick of REM sleep. But Peter is not asleep, not yet; not with the soft growl of the engine in his ears and Nathan’s body so palpably close at his side.

Rain-Nathan pulls back an inch to brush the boy’s dark bangs, pearled with drops of water, out of his eyes. Nathan’s eyes are cloudy too as he bends again, as if to take a strand of hair between his lips and, slowly, sensuously, suck the water from it.

Peter’s eyes bulge open.

“Still awake?” Nathan’s voice asks from _too close_ , just as Peter clamps his thighs together. Where they touch, sensation ripples to a spark, a match struck close against his balls. Oh Lord. Another trail blazes down his cheeks, his heart, and, in its relentless symmetry, up his groin. Oh Lord. Oh _no_.

“Be there in an hour or two,” the voice offers, hoarse with love. Peter tries to curl up on himself, helpless against the closeted privacy of the car. “We’ll fly them over the frontier, you and I. Find a safehouse for the next days, then I’ll get back to Wash—”

“No, no,” Peter cries out, half to his treacherous self.

“Pete…” Now Nathan sounds truly exhausted. “Your terms? Remember? That I man up and own—”

 _You own me_ , Peter thinks in ravaging clarity. What he says is “You can’t big boy me into staying put, Nathan. Where you go, there I go.” His breath jags on a dry sob. “But now I have to go to sleep! Have to!”

“All right. Shhh-sh, all right, Pete. Not so loud, you’ll wake Ma.”

And then, Nathan begins to hum. An under-the-radar song, the sort that calls for hooded eyes and a guitar in your hands, sweet and slow. Peter remembers it as something Italian that came after the kiss, before Nathan gave his comforter a final tuck and whispered “Yesterday’s over, Peter Little Peter. Sleep tight, wake up sober!” (Dad disapproved).

Tonight, the song loosens him; lolls him away to sleep, his thighs limper, blissfully heavier. Only his head keeps bobbing against the stiff leather, until there are two fingers on the side of his chin, guiding him to his resting place. Peter burrows into Nathan’s warm neck:  _in darkness we trust_.

And darkness gives him an easy time. No tossing and turning, no giddiness. Only the night coming from every angle, welling inside him, making it possible for the first dream-vision to come into focus.

For a while, he sees nothing. And then… and then the dream shows him night, dotted with pinks and reds above a checkered floor, while a radio hums softly and Nathan crosses into his vision field, leading Angela back to their table.

 

* * *

 

His plate is the first to go, hurled at the television set and its gravy of voices. It crashes mid-course, jilting salad leaves right and left before Peter flings his fist down onto the tabletop; gropes for the metal container, another improvised weapon.

In the next wild pulse, he sees himself thrashing the place. Blinds torn off, chairs drop-kicked, tables busted, shakes shaken and sprayed in every direction, a crazy ballet of locals getting headbutted or thrown through a window-pane. Fury and frustration call, and Peter answers. But his shout is still rending the air when his missile is prised from him and he is being pinioned, Noah’s arms closing around his chest like a crab’s pincers.

Peter throws his head back. The next crash leaves him stumbling forward while Bennet curses, his nose clutched in one hand and his glasses in the other. There are cries of “Peter!” and “Dad!” and even “Dadgummit!” in his back, then the door, and then he is outside and flying. Well, flying. More like plummeting horizontally, eyes blind, eardrums hit louder and louder by the wind; falling, falling down the rabbit’s hole. Back to when it all started, and he knows he’s found it when the first pelt of rain slaps into him: Coyote Sands’ own little eco cycle. Endless rain, turning the burial site into mudland that sucks in his shoes at landing, tipping Peter sideways.

 _Mucked up that too_ , knee-deep in the black mud.

He is trapped in a pool of tears, wept out of an old child’s heart and hideout. Pouring, Alice’s mad tear-party, her grief interminable at what was lost and can never be recovered, never set right, however hard they tried. Down, down, down, trickling on Peter’s face even as his roar burns him up.

He punches the oozy grave one last time, lifts his face to defeat.

Nathan is kneeling before him in the rain, his jacket held in one hand and his arms held out to Peter. Nathan looks like a fall from grace, dirtied up from trouser knees to what was once an impeccable quiff. And he is trying to bundle Peter into the jacket, talking all the while, even if half of what he says is washed away by the strafing rain. Peter catches _msorryPete_ and keels forward, a hand to Nathan’s mouth, because there’s only so much he can take when the past dishes it out and Nathan’s dead dear final words are on the too-much side.

When Nathan’s lips move under the gag, Peter’s palm records the plea, the kiss a moment before Nathan turns his head. Turns the other cheek, really, so that Peter ends up cupping it instead.

“…hurt you,” his brother says in the wind. It throws water at them, whips Peter’s dripping hair into his eyes. Peter pitches gravity against remorse and leans into what has become Nathan’s crumple zone.

“Peter. Pete, ah god. Goddamnit. Hell, it goes in circles.” Nathan’s voice is slippery too. “Vicious, pompous, hurtful...  a dupe tricked up as a jackass, me. Always me. What can I do to make it better? _Who can I be so you don’t get hurt_?”

“Nathan, no.” Peter finds his brother’s hand, wrestles it from the mud, clasps it to the back of his neck. “Here, hang on. Don’t. I mean, don’t…stop being you. Whoever you want. I swear.  Just, just, you.”

“Peter...look at me.”

“I am!” Peter grounds his knees into the mire, cradles the ruined face in both hands. “I see the brother who…”

“I raised my hand to you.”

“Fuck!” And his cussing actually stuns Nathan into silence. “Why does everything have to be a pissing contest with you? Who shot you twice? Who killed your father? Nathan, do you want me to loathe myself? Tell me, because if that’s where you’re headed, then I’m right behind you.”

“There’s no comparison—”

“ _Bull_ shit. Because, that hero thing? Being the one they need? Is a need. I get it, Nathan, I get it, because it got me first. Gut-deep, these last months.” _These last months_. A break in the storm takes Peter back to the place he once called home, decked out in paramedic blue save for the bearing wall and its proud display of press cuttings. “And the more I starved, the more I fed it. So I could be somebody.” Peter’s Saviorama, the hunger cutting a deeper notch with each debt of life.

He pulls Nathan closer, bringing their foreheads together. “Tell me,” Peter says. ”Just this one thing. When you betrayed me, that night, in my place...in your arms. What did you think, then?”

A damp caress of eyelashes on his cheek, like little brushes dipped in water. Nathan must be closing his eyes.

“I thought… I thought, I love him more than that.”

“Good.” Peter takes an inbreath of air; cold in, warm out. “Now for the hard part.”

“Pete. I don’t expect a miracle. I’ll give you all the time you need, I’ll go and make a clean breast…”

“I hardened my heart,” Peter whispers, shivering under the cold-soaked weight of leather. “Against you.”

The next flash of thunder brings a hotel floor and its salmon-pink hallway; brings back Nathan’s voice, low, ominous. Even then, Nathan had known the hallway was a one-way trip for him, and only Peter would leave the Stanton alive. Peter’s answer had been brisk, almost glib, his mind focused on the oncoming fight.

“But I’m gonna get us out of this rut. Nathan, I’ll find a way and then we’ll sort everything out, I swear. So hush worrying. I’ve got you back, okay? You’re here, the real you, and it’s all that matters to me. Ever, at any time. Honest  to God. Nathan, you know that?”

Nathan holds his peace so long that Peter wonders if this is how they’ll end, kneeling at each other’s feet, two clay statues baked hard by the Arizona sun long after the rest of cosmos has forgotten them.

Then Nathan’s words are pressed to his cheek, finally, _finally_ , Nathan’s surrender.

“Yeah”—the release swelling his breath—“I do. And I love you too.”

 

* * *

 

“Look who the wind flew in,” Noah says, not unkindly.

He stands before the Coyote Sands Café, a grey-clad bodyguard, his arms akimbo. And he still exudes composure, even with a fat red bump capping his left eyebrow. Peter gives the bump a sheepish look; Noah raises his right eyebrow in absolution.

“None taken. Though I never want to see what you’re up to with a knife in your hands, Peter. So. We’ve defused the situation here. Cash-for-crash, you might say. Luckily, your mother came prepared. ”

Peter cranes his head to peer into the café. Its night interior looks drowsy, the clientele sparser, silhouetted against the moonglow of the vast TV screen. The screen is alive with news: a close-up of President Worf’s face, all pixelated ire and flaring nostrils.

“Noah…”

“Foster homes were found for every salad leaf,” Noah says louder — too loud, his bulk massed between the door and Nathan. Not letting Nathan in, Peter deduces, nor letting him in on what’s on the air. Well planned, Noah. “Now, Bagdad Café here has two rooms above. And they both happen to be free. So we lie low tonight, rise at cock’s crow. Access is a side entrance up the fire stairs.” 

“I should talk to Claire—”

“Ah, the ladies have already turned in. Claire’s seventeen, remember?” Noah’s smile veers into daughter-savvy mode and Nathan, Peter’s hand on his arm, halts. “Regeneration is essential to her, but so is getting her beauty nap. She looked more than ready for it when I left her.”

 _To her grandmother’s care_ goes unsaid. Sleep ability comes with a few side apps, especially when dealing with Claire, who must have battled every iron step with “We _have_ to tell him! You can’t _hide_ the truth from people!” And now Peter owes Noah again. “What about you?” he asks.

  
Noah, predictably, answers that he will be around keeping an eye open, and has already taken advantage of the bath facilities. Which is Nathan’s cue to take stock of his very un-Nathan state of dress and go in search of the fire stairs.

One mental bow, Hiro-style, and Peter follows him.


	3. Chapter 3

As size goes, the bath facilities hardly deserve a plural.

On the plus side, they come with hot water and a couple of clean towels. Peter cuts short a shivering Nathan’s attempt to cross-examine the showerhead and leaves him under the water to check their room. When he comes back, stripped to his briefs and socks, the bath is packed with steam and Nathan is hogging the mirror space, Peter’s emergency toilet case at his feet. The bag is brown paper, issued by a dime store outside El Mirage which sold cheap combs, toothpaste, disposable razors, dime store shaving gel and nostalgic candy.

Peter, leaning against the doorway, munches on a jelly bean. “The times, they are a changin’.”

In the foggy mirror, Nathan scrunches his nose above the white lather. “The many, many times I caught you scratching at your peach fuzz with my Dovo Deluxe? Can’t say I miss those. What did I do, spank you?”

His loins girded with a towel, the rest of him in plain view. Nathan’s body is still the darling of every cameraman this side of the Oprah Show. Stern planes above, towering over self-disciplined curves and calves. But thicker, Peter can see, now a year has gone and taken off their sharp bloom. Perhaps he’d win these races for good, if he and Nathan could still afford to run for running’s sake.

Still. _Nathan’s_ body, made tender by every trial and error, and making Peter ache so sweetly he is glad for the fog. He toes the line, hoping the steam will melt him too, will take away that last hard feeling now condensed in his groin. It doesn’t.

“Worse,” he tells Nathan. “You said ‘oh, hello Mr Linderman’. Smartass.”

“At least it kept you away from my blades.” Nathan grins; treats himself to a quick rinse and makes for the narrow hallway. Pauses. His next words are spoken half for the emptiness. “Before you went and grew up on me.”

And Peter, the steam pearling on his face, finds that even more of him is growing at the words.

Thankfully, the hot water still delivers when he enter the shower. Better still, Nathan is half asleep in bed when he leaves it. Bed, singular. Peter considers, then slips back into his pants, grimacing at their damp embrace. They’ve washed and scraped off the mud the best they could, but the result is far from sterling.

“You’re going?” A deep crease pinches the skin between Nathan’s eyes.

“Going to sleep, in a minute. I’ll just give the place a last look-over.” Peter crosses back to sit on the edge of the bed. “What’s bothering you?”

“Claire…”

“…is fine. She loves you, you big lummock.” Peter reaches up to put out the main ceiling lights. “Bet you she’ll try to cadge off another flight with you tomorrow. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

“How?” Nathan’s eyes are no longer open, but he turns and tosses to lie on his side, one arm flung limply across the empty pillow.

“We get to the root of it.” Peter leans forward and places his lips on Nathan’s lion wrinkle. _Tonight_.

When he pulls back, Nathan stirs, the covers sliding down his chest as he loops a drowsy arm round Peter neck. Nathan’s words have the sweet slur of sleep to them.

"W’never... really flew. Together. Never… me and you..."

Peter lets his next kiss linger until he can feel Nathan’s brow clear up under his touch.

“Wanted to," Nathan mumbles. "So long. So much. Should’ve... told you…"

Then his arm falls back, and when Peter can afford to look again, Nathan is asleep, cradled in the deep hum of his breath.

The sight fills Peter with a great thirsty love, a shudder of joy, because, yeah. So long. _So_ long since Nathan showed a peaceful face to sleep, and Peter can’t take his eyes off, his throat constricted by something that is not fear but is the opposite of quiet. The moonlight outlines Nathan’s hand, the one that is not snuggled against his mouth, and Peter strokes its length before slipping his finger pads under its palm.

(They’re good at holding each other in free fall, he and Nathan.)

His other hand gropes for the cordless phone, dials out. Peter sits taut and waits for the woman to answer.

"Elizabeth? Peter, Peter Petrelli." He can hear the other night noises, the crossed patterns of phone rings, educated voices, the occasional rattle of high heels. Such a far cry from their Arizona night. This night is filling their window with moon and wind, making it rattle between the soft ups and downs of Nathan’s breath.

“Is my brother… yeah, I thought so. Regular nighthawk, yeah.” Peter’s mouth contracts on one side. “Thanks. Holding.”

He is pressing his fingers up to Nathan’s palm when the next voice ghosts his ear.

“Pete! Thank God. Gee, you had me worried out of my skin.” The voice drops to a conspiratorial hush. “Where are you, buddy?”

Peter cuts to the chase. “I’m with Nathan.”

A pause. A door clicking shut. The silence raises words in Peter’s mind, the relic of another troubled year, after he’d pitched his major in Romantic Poetry against Dad’s ‘I object’ and Nathan’s ‘Irrelevant’. _Darkling I listen._

“Oooh," Sylar says at last, fleshing the sound out into derision. “Is that a warning? Brave Sir Peter calling to tell me, what? Gotcha? Brothers keepers, killers can’t be choosers?”

“No,” Peter says quietly. “That’s not why I’m calling.”

“Well, my curiosity is piqued.” Another pause, as Sylar moves out of sight. Far away, a tinkle of glass yields to the boom of a heavy object being set down. Then ticking, ticking in the hollow of his ear, and Peter jerks back in horror just when Sylar says “Baccarat’s prestige anniversary clock. Big Brother should take better care of his toys, _Pete_. You have two minutes.”

Peter takes a difficult breath.

“You were four,” he says, enunciating each word carefully. “Squatting on the kitchen steps and sucking on a popsicle when she brought it home. Another globe, only this one had a photograph of your face in it. And she flipped it upside down and put it close to your real face, look, Gaby, look!”

Silence.

“Even now, you remember how the inside of your mouth felt cold when she made you watch the snow drip on your own face. Before she set it next to the others, which only had houses and buildings in them because they were State souvenirs. That one’s _special_ , she, your mom said. And it’s going to _last forever_. Like the other globes and what was trapped inside. Nothing moved in here, nothing, only the white dust falling on the empty houses and into that little kid’s eyes.”

Silence.

“It helped, watching your dad mend the clocks. They made noises. And he always took the glass case off first thing.”

“No living man knows about this _._ ” Lower tones almost visceral. “No Parkman could access it, father or son. Who told you?”

“You do. Five years on from now.” On the bed Nathan turns, sighs; a warm puff of air before he pushes his face again into the pillow. “When I see you in hell.”

“Oh, Peter. You Italians are so hyperbo…”

“No,” Peter says flatly. “Hell is where they put you after you kill Nathan. I know. I’ve been there.”

The clock ticks on, each cold chirp hard upon the last.

“Prove it.” Sylar’s voice is just as steely.

“How?”

“I have my plans for Claire’s father, Peter. Tell me what they are. How do I kill him?”

It’s getting hard to speak, but Peter does; pushes the words past the painful fist pushing down his throat. “Same as Claire’s other father killed you. You, you. You slit his...”

“Correct.” Sylar laughs, nails in his voice, frost in his breath. “Well, he thinks his neck looks good in red. Who am I to dispute with a senator?”

The rage feels like a fire blizzard in his skull, the emotion so shocking he has to close his eyes. “I take you out myself,” Peter whispers to the dark. “ _So_ easy, once I figure it out. You have no idea. _So_ civilized. And then the others come, Sylar, and they take the rest of you. Scoop it out like pumpkin mush, your brains, powers, your past, the whole self-made man, until even your body is no longer yours. And then? Man, Sartre was a moron. You know why? Because Hell is _nothing_ like others. Hell is alone and unloved in a city that’s all empty houses and nobody, nobody to hear you scream from a mouth packed with snow. Try it. Try it, you son of a bitch. You’ll have all eternity to practise.”

Sylar’s laugh is fast and furious. “Ah, ah, and you get an out-of-jail card? A Petrelli?”

“Yeah,” Peter says heavily. “I get out.”

The noise made by a clock is a two-way swing, like a scythe. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

“...What do you want?”

If he was a good man, he would spare a flicker of shame for what he’s doing, damning a man who only yesterday did his honest best – if you can say that of Sylar – to woo Peter’s forgiveness. But there are people out there, in the little adobe houses behind the fields of sage and the moon trailing the winds over them, and beyond the fields, and they have to be saved.

If Peter was a saint, he’d give Sylar a measure of hope.

Being a Petrelli, he proceeds to do just that.

“I want you to change. For good. You let up on the Hunger and I let you out. Give you money. Immunity.” Peter swallows. “Give you Gabriel back, body and soul. Hell, Sylar, I’ll let you keep your powers. Trust me, I’ve driven harder bargains.”

“Give me to myself.” Toneless, now. “What revels of generosity, Peter. And where does that leave me?”

“A new man.” Nathan’s fingers twitch, the surface of his sleep touched by a deeper ripple, and Peter tightens his grasp, stroking his thumb across the tense knuckles. “A whole man. With the ability to love and be loved.”

“Really?” In the distance, he can hear Sylar’s feet pad around Nathan’s desk. “Look outside the window, Peter. The night always lets go of the day in the end. But a man’s past? That’s another story. Take everything I’ve been, the sum of all I’ve done, and top it with that brave new day. Who will take the deal?”

“I’ve seen you make it.” Peter thinks back to the child Noah, his life erased by Peter’s fault, his death another lie by omission. “Think, Sylar. You could still have a…”

“Family.” The word is tossed back to him like a slur. “Oh yes, I remember Papa and Mamma Petrelli promising me one if I’d be a good boy. Before I knew how they love, that clan of yours. Father, mother, brother – your precious Nathan, who threw you to his wolves.”

“Shut up, shut…” Even that name in that mouth is enough to jig Peter’s old demons. “What d’you know of hearts? Nathan's has more love in it than you’ll ever figure out in your sick, rotten…”

“Oh, Peter.” Sylar’s voice is quiet now. “Listen to the pot calling the kettle fishy.”

“What... do you mean?”

The screech of a revolving chair being wheeled around. Sylar must be facing the bay window  behind Nathan’s desk.

“Let us put it this way. I’ve been a very spoilt boy, Peter. You see, my... mother wasn’t the only one to bring a homecoming gift. Mama Petrelli gave me one too, not so long ago. Technically, it’s called psychometrics. All I have to do is touch an object, and…”

“I know what it is.” And with the knowledge come the first goosebumps, still easily masked into bravado. “So what?”

“I’m afraid I took a few liberties with your brother’s things. His portrait gallery, for starters. Twenty-nine of them, and they call _me_ a monomaniac?” Sylar laughs softly. “Poor Nathan, how he loves his maze of mirrors. Takes such good care of them, too, or his staff does for him. Every pic spic and span. And yet, from what they tell me – the pictures – he never touches them. Almost. Not even dear Heidi who has pride of place on his desk, in her little glass coffin. He leaves her to the featherduster. _But_.”

Peter’s heart beats, pounds. As hearts do for a living, and it isn’t as if his hasn’t taken a pounding before where Nathan was concerned. Only to find itself pumping more love, more and warmer life into Peter’s veins.

“But?”

“Rules, exception. That one picture he keeps his back turned to. Keeps on his window sill, right behind his chair – can you guess what it is? You should. You look so…delicious in it, all dolled up in a tux. Nathan thinks you do. Oh, the things he’s done to it in the late hours, when he’s stuck here burning… the midnight oil. Wanna hear more?”

Peter’s blood pummels, fuelling the images in his head.

“The touch of his lips,” Sylar whispers uninvited. “The kiss of his breath. Now _you_ picture him, Nathan Petrelli with a Capitol P, slumped in this very chair – with only a sliver of glass between you and his lust. Weeks, months of pushing you away, only for his hand to sneak down his office pants and clutch his rod of shame. Tears in his eyes, tongue to the glass. Oh, what a night!”

“Prove it,” Peter says hoarsely.

But already he knows. The proof is on his side, under his eyes – Nathan’s arm flung onto the Peter-shaped gap at his side, searching, wanting. Nathan’s face flushed by sleep, the hard line of his mouth broken when he sighs and flops onto his back, his lips and his thighs parted on a silent demand.

Sylar is laughing as if he’d seen it all.

“Poor Nathan. Two-timing everyone around him, and he can’t escape that two-time beat in his sick little heart. Hear it tick? Pe-ter, it says. Pe-ter.”

“Nathan,” Peter answers under his breath. Trembling, rapt with a joy without a name, so strong he can’t trust himself to speak another word. “Nathan!”

“You…” Finally, blessedly, speech fails Sylar. “You don’t really seem to care.”

“Figured this out?” Peter allows himself the cheap, vengeful note. “No, I don’t. Wanna hear more?”

Silence.

“He hurts me, I choose him. He wrongs me, he wants me, I choose him. He fails, we fall, I still embrace him, I choose him! Christ, you really don’t get us, do you? He’s _Nathan_. That’s one election he’ll always win alone, no matter what.”

Silence.

“Yes”, says darkling Sylar. “If anyone can love a sinner, that would be you. All right, Peter – time for _my_ offer. My change of heart for yours.”

“My… what?”

“Oh, we can dispense with the carnal clause.” A short, humorless laugh. “But I want a slice of Nathan’s luck. Choose the freak, save the world. Can you do this? Careful, you know I can tell if you’re lying.”

“I…”

But Peter remembers only too well. Forgiving Sylar had come at last, but it had come with no soft feeling on his part. He’d let go of his rage, his daylight, and that was when everything else had been snuffed in him. Everything save the hope that, once Emma was rescued, they would part ways; that Peter would rack his mind for every Sylar memory, lock them away and seal the casket in the deepest, darkest corner of his mind. Just as Nathan’s body had lain for weeks, slashed and naked and desecrated, in a dusty storage room.

“I…” He looks down at their entwined fingers, thinks of a future where it could be their bodies wrapped around each other, clumsy and laughing, Nathan’s face shining with baffled joy while Peter pushes up against him.

Far away, a clock is beating the time.

He can’t do it.

The new sound is even lighter: the well-oiled sound of a desk drawer rolling open. Peter’s memory perks up. Something Nathan keeps there…

“Damned if I do,” Sylar murmurs. “Damned if I don’t.”

“Wait!” Fear lights up the memory, Nathan telling him what it was he’d gone to fetch that day, from that desk. Peter croaks his next words before he knows better. “I’ll do it. Sylar, oh God, don’t you... I will, I swear, I, I’ll be  your friend if that’s what it...”

“Pe-ter.” The mournful ring to Sylar’s voice is horrible. “Pe-ter. One minute slow.”

The deflagration tears him away from Nathan, their room shattered, their bed, only Peter’s outrage left whole ( _not him too!_ ) along with stubborn joy ( _Nathan, you too_ ) as he topples headlong into the dark, and…


	4. Chapter 4

 

There is something to be said for the ripple, and it had better be said while Peter is still resurfacing on that faux-rockabilly floor. Here goes, then: the ripple is a two-way ride.

It goes round and round and... onwards. It takes Peter back to square one and no mistake; no saving done; no Nathan Reclamation Day ticked on his agenda. Only the continuum treating him like a latter-day Gatsby, who beats on in vain as he is borne ceaselessly into the past. And Peter knows how _that_ story ends.

And yet.

And yet each loop takes him further. If the loop is a vortex, then its eye hoards a vision. And Peter, always one for dreams and revelations, will go where it points. Every mile of it, even when the vortex shows what he’s never seen, never once suspected in almost thirty years of getting through to Nathan, come hell or fire (lead pipe optional). And it should scare him out of his wits, this darkness made visible. After all, heroes older and wiser than Peter have put their eyes out at that _sick and twisted_ chain of evidence, that taint, branding their love with more hellfire.

But no. Night unto night showeth knowledge, and Peter can’t thank it enough.

 

* * *

 

“Hey.” The café’s owner looks up as his new patron walks up to him. “D’you mind if we watch the sports channel for a bit? They’ve got sumos.”

When the owner makes a _schmumos_ face, Peter tilts his crooked mouth into a leer and reaches for a handshake. “Lady sumos, man.”  

The leer is a loser. Not so the bill folded against Peter’s palm – Nathan’s piece of advice, handed down to Peter when he turned eighteen and his brother remembered in time to take him to the Pierre and show him how to secure a table without a reservation.  

Nathan, still a man of the world, is pulling their mother’s chair for her. Peter catches up in time to catch his arm.

“We never said grace,” he says firmly.

Bennet’s thoughtful eyes travel from Peter to the sumos and back to Peter, before he too stands up.

Claire opens her mouth.

“Family quirk,” Peter cuts in with a wink. “Give me a minute before you dig in?”

Claire says “ _Digging_ , huh”, but joins her hands and looks down tentatively at the coleslaw.

“Lord,” Peter begins without a pause. “You know who we are. What we do. Some would say, we’re walking danger zones. Well, not Claire, Claire still gets a pass. But take the rest of us.”

 He waits until Nathan has raised his gaze, until it is Peter’s to have and to hold across the circle of bowed heads.

“We don’t know how to love wisely,” he tells Nathan. “Only how to lie. Cross my heart, double-cross yours. We bust every law, every white line, and somewhere along the line, we bust each other too. But in the end, look at us. We’re stronger than all our denials, because the core of us? Is heart. Charles Deveaux knew it, and he tried to tell me before he died, only I didn’t listen. I never do, right?”

Nathan’s _Pete_ is a mute parting of lips.

“In the end, it’s not who you love that matters,” Peter urges, reckless, resting his case. “Or how. Just, we find each other, and we. Hold each other, unconditionally. Remember? We _heal_ each other, any which way. As we do now, with food and rest, and... and the rest. For which, Lord, thanks and amen” since Angela is looking up again, never one to dawdle in her devotions.

Yet she doesn’t comment. She lowers her head again with a little smile that Peter, if he didn’t know better, would say is plain grateful. Then she asks Noah for the salt.

Their meal is quiet, but Peter can feel a change in the air. They eat together, five people huddled at a table for four and making it their family dinner box. They weave a ring of light touches, elbows brushing, Noah letting Claire steal his fries while she tells them about The Day Mr Muggles Ate  a Pickle And Was Not Amused. And Nathan, Nathan darts hopeful peeps over his burger, still wondering when the Peter split between love and hate gave way to a Peter who blocks each furtive glance only to smile back a _Yes you are_.

As for Peter, he eats his cheese’n cheese and basks in the warmth of reunion.

“Two rooms?” he is asked later. “Here? Who told you that?”

Peter grins over at Noah. “Some wise man here. Look, it’s been a hard day’s night. Nobody knows we’re here. And we’ll make a better and earlier start if we start refreshed. The way I see it, Mom and Claire can share one, and –”

Noah nods. “I’ll be in my car,” he says, clockwork-reliable. “Keeping an eye around.”

“No, you stay with Claire. And, Ma, you and Peter can have the other room.” (Nathan, back to pelican mode and not to be outbid.) “I need to get back anyway, talk to the –”

Which is when Peter mentions the rooftop.

 

* * *

 

That the café comes with a roof is hardly a moot point. The café’s owner confirms it, and that he’s been known to rent it for the night, unique view of the mesquite, airbed a plus, mosquitoes a gamble. Hot water is mentioned: suddenly, there is no more talk of Washington or Noah amping his insomnia record to new and less-than-commendable levels. Peter is taken to the storage room by the owner (“Call me Sean”), who helps him carry the inflatable mattress up the fire stairs and pump enough air into it to mortify a flying carpet.

Down steps Peter again for a quick scrub. When he emerges, struggling into a fresh Tee, he finds Angela waiting.

“That was a lovely prayer, dear.” Somewhere between their two pit stops, one at the dime store and one at a stranded gas station, she has got hold of a black satin kimono. It’s polyester, really, but with the genuine diamonds in her ears, and the genuine smile, it makes quite the ensemble.

“Hear, hear.” The door to the first room is open and Noah fills its frame, idling, peeling his jacket off. No Claire in sight. The glint in his spectacles matches the glimmer in Angela’s eyes: Peter does a double take.

“Oh yes.  _Very_ inspiring.” She and Bennet look at each other, shrewd in their mutual understanding, before Angela shakes her head.

“If I’d listened to Charles myself… but no. You’re not just a democrat, Peter, you’re a vegan. Your first executive order would be to pardon _every_ turkey and, with your luck, we’d have Kansas up in arms. Ah well.”

“There’s always the Vatican, Angela.” If Bennet comes any closer, he’ll be conducting his next bag-and-tag operation on her cleavage.

“Oh, Noah.” And if dimples could purr, Angela would be on blatant vibrate. “I’ve always known I could rest in your… faithfulness.”

Peter flees as far as the next room, where Claire is saying goodnight to her bi-o-dad.

“I’m going to sleep at _ten_?” she yawns in protest. “Okay, once we’re done putting things right, we’re totally discussing my bedtime.”

“Not negotiable. You heard your uncle, honey. We leave at sunrise, and that’s only forty winks away.”

“Hmmm. Try not to make it a tequila sunrise?” – but then she sits up to give him a hug, and Peter spot his cue to find the stairs again.

Waiting. Heartbeating. Watching Nathan pause to take in the surprisingly clean area, cross over to the mattress, toe off his shoes. Hasn’t bothered with socks again, Peter notices. And he’s seen his brother strip down to his briefs before, summering in Vermont, or after a bout of sports, or when Nathan hitched back from work only to shimmy into full evening dress and be a prince among the family guests. But this is something new – that strange, secretive jolt of pleasure at the sight of Nathan barefoot in his leather shoes.

Tucked against the parapet, the mattress is a pool of whiteness. It dips a little when Peter lifts a corner of the thin blanket and a cautious Nathan sits, then lies down at his side. Peter’s prayer has taken care of the sword between them, or so he hopes. Still, he waits until Nathan’s next words, spoken to the night.

“How do we fix this?”

Peter copies his pose, eyes to the sky. “Together.”  

Nathan turns at last, propped up on his elbow, questing for a look before he dares a touch. Peter does the same. “We’re terrible when we’re apart,” Nathan whispers, still immersed in a past that already feels a lost horizon to Peter.

He strokes down a clean-shaven cheek. “Yesterday’s over, Nate.”

“Is it?” Nathan’s face is still weighed down with gravity.

“Yeah. Tell you what - tomorrow first thing, we fly them to safety. You and I.”

“Together.” The body heat fountains from Nathan when Peter reaches for his brother’s hand, plaiting their fingers into a cat’s-cradle hug. Overhead, the sky maps out brilliance as it did long ago, back when they huddled in the old tree-house, Peter fourteen, Nathan not yet fortune’s fool.

A dizzying sight, and Peter drinks it in before his first step over the edge. “Never told you,” he says. Throat tight, heart set on knocking itself out against his ribs. _Do or die_.

“What?” Nathan is no longer looking at the sky.

“We never...we never really flew together.” Soft-voiced, so low it becomes Nathan’s call if he hears the words or not. “Side to side, you and I. And I’ve wanted to from the start. So much, Nate. So long.”

Nathan’s long exhale is breath consummate. “...You too?”

“Yeah. Christ, yeah.” Peter keeps their fingers laced as he scuttles closer, rests his head on Nathan’s shoulder. “Hey. What say we wait for break of day and test the air? Wind here’s a cool thing. It wraps itself all over you, tangy-like but not too sharp. Feel it?”

He lets their feet kick back the slim cotton-crocheted spread until the wind swathes them, making them feel their own damp skin. Peter breathes in a gulp, coughs a bit. “Feels high,” he adds impishly.

“Soaring.” His giggle is caught and returned, brushing Peter’s lips.

“Until I’m racing you. ’Cause you know I will. Like a...” _Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun_ , floats in uninvited. Peter kicks it out. Unbodied, hell. “Like a hawk. Right behind you, running circles around you, close, closer. In the wind. In the sun. Let me?”

“Not if I catch you first!” And the next moment he is hauled, flung into the strong circle of Nathan’s arm, and they’re rolling all over the patient mattress, laughing each other silly. “In the sun,” Nathan pants.

“In the wind. Wow, that wind!” Their breaths catch up excitedly as Peter lines their faces again, shaking with laughter, their foreheads, the wings of their noses. Their legs are still tangled up, their bodies exposed, locked in a full-blown embrace.

“Tidal wind,” Nathan pants. “Bastard’s got _nothing_ on us. Hold me tight, Pete!”

“Always!” And Peter’s veins sing with the outlaw’s rush of bliss. “Just go, anywhere you like, and I’m with you. Ah, look at you. All fierce and bright, Nathan, and nothing here’s got a hold on you, nothing. Power, money, law, gravity… time. Not here, they don’t. Not… anywhere you’ve got me” –  and when the wind is full on them, whistling, Peter throws them into it by kissing that sweet live breath straight on Nathan’s mouth.

The next moment is a flash-still, before Nathan prises his fingers loose and the sky opens up to swallow Peter. _Sylar, liar, oh God, why did I…_ but Nathan, it appears, has only freed his hand to cradle his brother’s face and turn it up to the starlight.

“Pete,” Nathan says, his face ten years younger with hope and terror. And then, “If we go there... Peter, there’ll be no starting back from square one if we – ”

 _If only_ , Peter thinks, and finds his brother’s mouth again.

This time he is kissed back for all he’s worth; kissed with a will, Nathan’s, fierce and bright and ruthlessly strategic when Nathan tilts his head to cover all of Peter’s lips. Nathan owns the Petrelli mouth, with the virile cut and the Mediterranean bottom lip, and Peter gives it free play for a while. They clutch each other on the airbed, their knees already chafed from the friction, and Peter runs insatiable hands over Nathan’s forearms, his neck, his sweat-tousled hair, letting Nathan wrap him in the kiss until his own foray of tongue.

“I –” Nathan's soft gasp belies what Nathan is down below when Peter pushes up against him, avid for that hard evidence.

“I’ve never,” he starts again, only to stop. “No, I can't… that's not true. There was someone, long ago, but we just... fooled around. Nothing much. Nothing like – damnit, Pete, slow down!”

But his arms are quicker, holding Peter in place when the latter starts to pull back. Their next encounter is messy, territorial: a skidding trail of nips and sucks, taking bold tongues to the core of the kiss until Nathan suspends it with “You, ah, want to touch me?”

“Yes, Nathan, _yes_.”

“All of me?” Nathan’s mouth is on his, begging time, giving thanks. Holding Peter up while he ponders his final, perhaps his first self-made choice. “Then be my guest.”

Peter kisses him again and again, his temple, the perfect flap of his ear. “Be my first?”

… Later finds them face to face, kneeling, rocking frantically into each other’s fists. They’re absolute beginners, both of them: clumsy, knocking the backs of their hands together as they slip and grip in turn, fumbling for a rhythm. Then Nathan bends his head, tips three words into his brother’s ear –  and Peter’s orgasm impales him, arch after arch of electrifying pleasure, mingling with another hot gush on his thigh.

“Caught you,” Nathan chuckles – Nathan to the finish.

Later still, slipping out from their arms in the first watercolors of dawn, Peter answers _I love you too._

He has no notebook to write his note on, only a patch of cement on their side of the parapet. Peter licks the stump of pencil from his jeans pocket and scribbles “BACK” and “YOURS”. His memory mobbed, he adds “TAKE CARE OF” before the graphite tip breaks and his knuckles go scraping against the rough surface. On their bed of fortune, Nathan’s face looks paler in the dawn.

Peter takes his knuckles to his mouth, sucks the faint tang of betrayal.

But Matt Parkman’s Greyhound will strike D.C. in less than eight hours and Peter is the brother with the ingrained compass, moral or otherwise; not the lightspeed ace. If he can make it in time to shake Matt’s hand or clap his shoulder in a matey hug, more power to him. The rest is a matter of luck, grey morals, and Sylar sticking to his Stanton agenda even if his first prey never showed up.

Five years. They were long enough for Gabriel Gray to parse the cogs and wheels of Matt’s ability after he found himself on its receiving end. And Peter, Gabriel’s audience, will be damned if he can’t channel it; put it to the test in those few, invaluable seconds after he gurus his way into the hotel suite.

One touch. Not even that: one look, according to Gabriel. One look will do the trick if Peter is ruthless enough. Just do it, just send Sylar to the limbo where he was headed in the first place. Then nobody has to die; and the past, which Peter has made his mind up must never be told, not even as a past future, goes away; leaving the present with all of its bright patterns as intact as a butterfly’s wing.

“I must do it,” he tells Nathan, crouching next to the bed where his brother holds out empty arms in his sleep. “For us. I will, I can do it.”

Or he can die trying. But in the end, time is too fast even for irony. Sylar takes _his_ look first; sizes up black-clad Peter, nine parts crow to one part hawk, and parts the air with his hand. The air turns red and wet, trickling down over Peter’s eyes; but as it does, and Peter’s sight goes under, the pain impresses a new vision. Peter sees the wound cross into an older stigma – the oblique gash on his other face, that split it vertically and forced it to mirror the rift between Nathan and Peter.

His original sin. Unforgivable, because it led to every misguided choice, every blow, every heartbreak until Nathan was left a ghost puppet, and Peter was left alone.

When the new pain sears into him, crossing out the old scar, Peter embraces it.

In that moment, his mind shaken with death and hope, he wonders if this is it. If the loop was God’s wise trap all along, God stealing a march on his plans for Sylar by locking _Peter_ in limbo until he learnt to fucking.

Let.

Go.

If, now that Peter has, miracle of miracles, forgiven himself, the loop will release them and…

 

* * *

 

  
(The loop doesn’t.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, this chapter is a bit longer as we reach a turning-point in this, um, very loopy story. Thanks to all of you who read so far!

Peter's first act of rebellion against The System goes back to his fourth birthday.

Which doubled as the day he graduated to lunch at the family table, a vast and varnished affair by Casa Rossa. Though Peter’s chin barely made it over the tabletop, he'd scrambled gamely up his chair. Then he'd rested his chin on the top, taken a grazing view of the glass and china, blinked, beamed, and blasted the age-old Petrelli seating plan by assigning his Hispanic nanny to Arthur’s right.

Dad’s answer that it was bad form to impose their conversation on the culturally perplexed, son, was met with a wail. Formless, but loud enough to shrill Arthur _and_ Angela out of the room. Peter hadn’t let up for the next two hours, until Angela saw the light and fired Encarnación.

A quarter of century later, Peter’s rebellion takes the road less traveled: he becomes a conformist.

Oh, he will fight the good fight. Restlessly, night in night out. But if he does, and before he does, he will carve a safe niche for himself in that vicious circle. And thus, until the loop strikes oh-dark-thirty and it’s time to leave, Peter does exactly what he’s done the loop before.

Release the sumos. Re-seal the family with food, forgiveness and a little prayer that would make Aretha Franklin proud, never mind its subtle plea for a class E felony. Matchmake between Claire’s father and Claire’s grandmother. Eat his cheese. Redeem the rooftop.

And make love to Nathan, night in night out, in that scenery of concrete and great curved starry sky which is theirs now, theirs only.

 

* * *

 

Operation Building 26 is a piece of cake until Matt, set on sharing _his_ mind for once, tells Hiro about Sylar. Hiro, set on being Hiro, teleports to the Stanton in a wink. By the time Peter and a bevy of specials enter the suite, Sylar is nowhere to be seen.

 

But Hiro is in Ando’s arms, blood running from his nose in soft and deadly haste – and the look on Ando’s face has Peter _beg_ the loop to take him away.

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure?” Nathan’s hand lingers on his hair.

“Shhh. No more trust issues, remember? Just… yeah, part them a bit more. See? It’s straining for a kiss. Mm-hmm. Feel that?”

“You’re amazing,” Nathan whispers, and Peter, head bent to the task, shivers and sings at the fervent praise. “You – oh, _oh_. God, Pete, what are you… I’m… like a _gun_ …”

Peter laughs from the back of his throat, his mouth malleable and firm in turn as it gloves the now familiar shape of Nathan’s cock, stroked by his fingers to full heavyweight.

“Oh, fuck” - sharp as a prayer when Peter grabs the strong legs and hoists one over his shoulder so he can dip a knowing hand to Nathan’s balls. “Oh, that’s incredi… no, no, no... can’t, Pete... too, _ah_... soon…”

Peter lifts his face again, lips wet and roguish. “Early and often? Then I’ll fill you up again, _big_ boy.”

To his surprise, Nathan suddenly prises himself free. In a matter of seconds, he has Peter pinned under him and is bucking his hips in long, horizontal surges, Peter moaning under him like a dove. When Peter comes, the stars are everywhere and brilliant, like Nathan’s kiss after the act.

 

* * *

 

He calls Samuels himself, his voice still hoarse enough to pass itself off for another. When the man doesn’t show up at the hour and place, and the ripple tears Peter away three steps into the Stanton, Peter’s heart doesn’t know what to think.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps all the deaths are his penance. Or perhaps the circle is part-Paradise, because his relief at greeting Nathan alive never gets old, or dotting a line of kisses from one side of that bronzed neck to the other, whispering against the skin. Or watching Nathan cradle each of his knees between his hands, bow his head and touch his lips to them, then his forehead.

Their healing, stronger than any ability.

Punishment. Forgiveness. Pain and pleasure, death tolling life slashed under Peter’s eyes, only for the loop to give birth again. And again. After a while, he’s no longer sure if he can tell them apart. Story of his life?

 

* * *

 

“You didn’t .” Nathan sounds a fair balance between outrage and glee.

“Sure did.” Peter grins, removing his hand from behind his back and holding up his boon for inspection. “Good thing Sean keeps it in packs of all sizes, huh?”

When Nathan goes still at the words, Peter fears he’s gone too far. This, after all, is their alleged first time. But it has been their first time for so long now, and never enough. Not with Peter hungering for more, solider Nathan, up and around and inside of him, marking him with a secret flesh wound Peter can carry with him into the fray.

“You… took this from his store room?” Nathan is frowning. “Before we came up here?”

Peter looks up at him, mouth wet and pleading. “Spur of the moment.” Mouth lying, eyes holding Nathan tender, holding him true.

“Nate? Please? Please, I know you think we’ve gone far enough –”

“Far doesn’t begin to cover it.” Nathan passes a hand over his face, tries to take Peter’s. “Pete, it’s not that I don’t want to, but… damnit, you’re not even asking if you’re safe with me! How do you know I haven’t  –”

Peter scoffs. “As if you wouldn’t look out for yourself.”

“ _Touché_.” Nathan smiles ruefully, and Peter pushes his advantage.

“You said you wanted to atone. To at-one,” he repeats, in case his cunning dig at etymology went unheard. “Good, because I want you to. Be one. With me.”

“Decoyed with intent.” Nathan is shaking his head. “By my own brother. With _Crisco_ , of all the accessories to the...”

“Look, I’ll do it all. You won’t have to lift a finger, Nate.”

“A finger?” Nathan asks, deadpan, before his lifted eyebrow has the ribald laughter bubble up again between them. When Peter is too weak to protest, Nathan snatches the can from his hand and peels it open.

“Don’t mention it,” comes next, and “Together, Pete. You want it all, do you?  _Do_ you? The whole damnable road?”

Peter no longer cares if he sobs his next breath. “I’m only damned when there’s no you. I only want it all when it’s you. I know it, I do, it’s all I know now. Nathan!”

“Then we share every step.” And before Peter can sob again, Nathan is breathing into his mouth, shushing it. “Shhh, buddy. Com’ere.”

The first step burns all right. And it’s a slippery road, with Nathan’s hands struggling on Peter’s hips to keep him safe, inch into agonizing inch, while Peter and gravity fight him all the way down. And even then, even when Peter has his will and the pain of being racked and sundered blooms into something else, a flaring heat, a rapture, it’s still Nathan playing the moves; Nathan guiding him through each thrust; Nathan’s brotherly love finding its way into their wild rutting, like a tide of freshwater in the deep salty sea.

 

* * *

 

He’s losing count. Seven loops, Peter thinks wildly, or eight. Nine already? But seven has a nice ring to it, reviving the innocent days when he was still Peter Little Peter, dreamer extraordinaire, hoarder of myths and stories.

_Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” And Jesus said to him…_

Seventy times seven. Fair enough for Peter, who gets to be a hero in his own eyes even if Jesus thinks it’s all for the par. But the brother – what of him? Where does the story leave him if not in a hard place, stuck forever on the passive end of absolution? 

 

* * *

  

Peter grows reckless. Lashes into each new loop as if he could put his fist through its invisible wall.

Number eleven (or twelve? or fifteen?) finds him in New York, scanning Central Park and its early birds until he has found what he’s looking for: the knot of post-party teenagers, making out with a giggle and a last puff of pot. They’re glad to see him, and he’s even gladder that they have a camcorder with them.

The resulting film is a bit Dogme-like, but even a wobbly Peter is a money shot when hovering up and down over the grass as he warns the free world about specials, Sylar and Sylar’s current masterplan.  The young people flock off in search of Youtube; Peter flocks home.

The shot goes public.

The shot goes viral. Within the next hours, the President’s men have whisked him into safety, tiptoed Nathan’s secretary out of danger zone – backstairs policy at its best – and followed Peter’s advice of sending Mr Danko into the lion’s den with a free pardon and a dose of supertrank. The situation is contained, or would be if they were the only users to have hooked onto AbsolutelyNotHigh’s account. By the time two million people have watched, linked and reblogged Peter’s warning, the DNS server implodes and word of mouth takes over.

Somebody informs the general public that Sylar is a German corporation dating back to 1933, and what does _that_ say about this. Somebody else makes a connection with the movie _Solaris_ and its invasive replicas. Bodies of a scholarly persuasion start quoting - yelling if they must - Revelations, Nostradamus, Merlin’s Prophecies, the Secret of La Salette, Paco Rabanne. Traffic in Manhattan is long past breakpoint. Two minutes before noon, the first gunshot finds its mark.

And Peter, crossing peacefully into Colorado, feels himself lifted by the scruff of his neck and flown off course with none of the loop’s usual precaution.

 

* * *

 

The closer their embrace, the wider the gap between their minds. Time keeps them apart by taking Nathan back to their first, clumsy hurdle every time, even as it haunts Peter with memories _not_ to be shared, demands _not_ to be made...

“They made a lab rat out of me,” Nathan mutters, sated and vulnerable, burying his face into Peter’s chest. “I was seven. God’s sake, Pete. A chubby kid with a bowl haircut, who hated learning to cha cha with Boo Vanderbilt. You were the natural. Me? I was never enough.” 

(…confessions erased overnight, the light, teasing drum of Nathan’s fingertips in the small of his back, offered once and only once, making Peter’s orgasm _fuse_ out of him…)

“You were twenty-seven,” Peter tells him the next time, against Nathan’s puzzled face. “Fitting your body like a glove, like always. You hugged me and gave me a kiss in front of the taxi driver, remember? Then you put your mouth to my ear, well, my hair, more like, and you said, “Once a Pete, always a Pete”. And it made everything better. Because I didn’t care if you were Our Boy in Bosnia and white looked good on you, like Mom said. I just cared that I was losing _you_.”

(...the tight dark flush of Nathan’s nipples, the night he told Peter to suck and fondle them at the kill, before he came with choked little cries and moans, chasing the last streak of release…)

“I wanted to… to take what had been forced upon me and make it a gift. For people to choose, freely, so they could be extraordinary. I thought of you, so happy when you first...  I thought, Peter will be proud of me...”

(...or his brusque move to pull up Peter, flush with him so he can time his thrusts to the fast thud of Peter’s heart, until it feels as if Peter is inside him too, his heart at one with Nathan’s cock, pumping more life into him – Nathan says – than he ever enjoyed in forty years of shadow puppet theaters…)

“I must have killed you only so I could bring back,” Peter cries out, crying, laughing, but the next loop blanks his words out; casts him again as the hard-eyed, resentful brother. And now Peter knows how Nathan felt all of last year. It’s a terrible thing to know so much and keep the burden of it to yourself. Is it even fair? A year ago, he called it a lie.

How many times can they do this, if the loop never ends?

 _As many times as it takes_.

Because… because even if he told Nathan the truth, what then? He did, back when René said not to and Peter disobeyed because he craved to give Nathan his trust again, wrapped in love and ribboned with an offer to help his brother find himself again. And, oh, how the irony of it scalded him. The doubt, in hindsight:  _if I’d gone alone, if he’d never known_ , _would he still be alive?_

He can’t tell Nathan. No. Never. He can’t, he won’t.

But late at night, he thinks of all the times they found each other in shared memories – _It was election year, I see the brother who, Remember Kelly Houston?, That night in Kirby Plazza when I carried you away, We both flew Pete, He’s with Izzy now_ – and wonders about the continuity of pains and lies.

 

* * *

 

Bennet’s cushiony jaw gives nothing away when Peter says “So help me?”, having told his story on the curb, outside the café. He munches up his fry. Then flips out his napkin, wipes each meticulous finger and says, “Some evidence would help, Peter”.

Glancing up at him, Peter thinks of another night. Another desert, lit up by a pyre’s awful flames. How he stood next to Claire and watched Noah watch Sylar burn, tiny infernos refracted in his glasses, to Claire’s hushed confidence.

“Okay, then. Um. How about this. I know Sylar...” He makes himself confront the little, tiny Peter in these twin mirrors. “... almost made you kill your wife after he took her shape. And I can tell you that right now, even as we speak, he is –”

Which is when the eight-o’clock bus from Guadalupe turns the corner, and Bennet throws Peter right under it.

And really, Peter should have seen it coming. Bennet is a class A paranoiac when it comes to the care and protection of his own, and what he doesn’t know about double bluff wouldn’t fill a tooth cavity.

But Peter himself is nothing if not caring, and as he flails into his twentieth (twenty-fifth? thirtieth?) rebirth, he is all high-strung outrage. It’s one thing to be killed by Sylar, but that Bennet – that _Noah_ – who spared his life three times when Peter was a fugitive and offered paternal advice when he turned a recluse…

Noah’s gaze is as fond as ever while Peter rattles his prayer. But Peter, bristling with nerves, scandal and a strange childish pain, skips his meal, dips into his shower and (“Dear, that was a beauti –”) makes a dash for his rooftop.

Try as he may, he just can’t put their scene through its usual paces. He speaks, and Nathan answers; or Nathan wavers and Peter pleads, coarser and louder than before (“You’re not making love to Joe Voter!”), until _finally_ Nathan’s lips are on his naked skin, too slow, too skint. Peters stomach gurgles, and Nathan pauses in concern, but Peter just growls him on. Eyes shut against the great curved outside, until they’re fucking good and proper and Peter’s in their place, that tight hot fleshly channel he’s learnt to open just for the two of them.

And so he clambers his brother’s thighs and lifts himself up, fingers shaking as he puts them in his own mouth and loads them with saliva, rushes through his gentle diversions and negotiations, wrestles his own body. His body, sealed up with each new cycle of seduction, yet no virgin, not with the memory of all their pastimes stamped in its very core. Pushed into him, like his rude fingers, until Peter grabs Nathan and sinks into him without grace or finesse, his legs wrapped around Nathan’s waist, shuddering at how deep he’s…

“What the _hell_.”

Peter, blind, blissful, doesn’t hear. It takes Nathan’s rough grip on his shoulder to force his eyes open.

The face before his is so white it looks ashen in the starlight.

“Wha…?” And Peter has to clutch Nathan, only for Nathan to shake his hands free of Peter’s wrists.

“Get off me, now. Now!”

Peter has been on the wrong end of Nathan’s anger before, enough to know that the lower it speaks, the quicker it should be obeyed. But his body clings back, until Nathan struggles, Nathan pushes away with a finality more shattering than any blow.

“Fuck!” Peter tumbles sideways on the mattress. To hell with low. “What d’you think you’re doing?”

“My very thoughts.” Nathan gropes for his discarded Tee; wipes himself, almost savagely. “Because I’ve no idea what or who you’re doing tonight, Peter, but whoever he is, I won’t be his stand-in.”

“What?”

“ _Be my first_ ,” Nathan mimicks. “What sort of fool do you take me for? If this is your first time with a man, I’m Kofi Annan.”

Peter’s mouth works on hot air. Too early, too fast for their usual time: the wind is yet to come.

“Are you punishing me?” Nathan’s voice is almost guttural with effort. “Because if… if this is... fuck, Peter! Then it’s hell all right, _you_ using me, _you_ manipulating…”

“No!” And Peter knows he looks pathetic, cock at half-mast, hair in his eyes, quivering with the adrenaline of loss. All the more when Nathan swerves on him, jerking him to his knees.

“Tell me his name, then.”

“It’s not what you –”

“Don’t _lie_ to me!” Suddenly Nathan’s eyes darken, their black pupils widening as if Nathan’s blood had risen all the way up, crashing every obstacle between heart and head. “Is this about the pain?”

The rooftop smells of tar and dust, of bodies estranged, of no second coming for the summer rains.

“Come, Peter, you know me. I’m not an innocent. Naive, yeah, in thinking you one. So tell me, _lover_ – is it the pain you’re after? Someone to dish it out? Hurt you as bad as he does?”

“No! God, no! Nathan, I swear  –”

“Don’t.” Voice raw, head turned away – the pose speaks Nathan more than he knows. “You’ve done enough damage without perjuring yourself. What did he do, Pete? How much did he fuck you up, that you had to talk me into fucking you like a five-dollar whore on a ten-dollar mattress?”

“He died!” Blind, choking, speaking past his dark-fogged brain. The words hurt almost physically as he speaks them. “He _fucking_ died on me, okay? Happy now?”

He tries to say more, but when he opens his mouth the tears flow out and with them a great, shuddering spasm. Peter takes his fist to his mouth but the sobs spill over his knuckles, and when he has to breathe again the oxygen is pain, corrosive, flaying his lungs. All-grief sorrow, without the distraction of guilt; all Peter weeping for Nathan out of time, because time is an honorary Petrelli, the biggest fucker of them all, and it never cut Peter a break that could be all about breaking down over Nathan.

Never until now.

He is rocking back and forth, his head pushed down into his knees, when he feels himself caught and pulled back against a warm chest. His rescuer doesn’t speak, just rocks along with him, wrapping Peter’s erratic course between his arms and legs until Peter is keeling slower, slower; open-mouthed despite the hard sobs; breathing the air again. 

“I know,” Nathan whispers, his anger gone. “Peter. Oh, Pete, I _know_.”

He knows, yes. He lost his baby girl to a dark and his father to a darker end, and more recently, he was so jostled by the loss of five nameless snipers in Arkansas he had to phone his ma. He is Nathan Petrelli, ex-peacekeeper, ex-crimefighter, and anyone who thinks death is fair game to him is a moron. Ask Linderman, who thought all it would take was a spoonful of maths. Moron, moron, _moron_. People crumple and shatter around Nathan, and their individual tragedies upset him more than his own ever will. Peter knows. There is, after all, a reason why he let Nathan goof over his choice of career. One that dates back to the day Peter showed up at the Big House, unannounced, only to barge into a force-five family row and Nathan's shouted “...asks for voluntary euthanasia? What then, Ma? Do you think he’d be the sort of person who says no?”.

Now Nathan is muttering, so low it’s almost as if the words were not taking shape, just the connection between them, making them each other’s telepath.  

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took on his meanness with his plans, his will, his... and then, when I tried to destroy the thing you prized because I had nearly killed you over it, I... I had no idea, Pete. That there was someone. And I would do anything, _anything_ to turn the clock back and stop that plane, give him back to you... ”

“No!” Peter moves in the embrace until Nathan understands and turns him round in his arms. Lets him rub his cheek to Nathan’s, no longer cool and spared from grief. “Ah, sweetheart, no. Not Danko.”

He kisses the cheek, then under Nathan’s jaw, once, twice, but the pulse does not abate. “Sylar,” Peter gives him.

“Sylar killed him? Under your eyes?”

“No… well, yes… Nathan, stay with me!” If Peter stretches his arm out, he will touch the stone ledge; feel how strong and stable it is, and remember how it guards nothing at all in the end. He cries out, his head spinning. 

“I’m here, I’m not going. I’m with you.” Nathan tucks Peter’s head against his neck, kisses along his hairline. “Oh God, don’t hurt so. Let me fix this. There has to be something… anything. Close your eyes, and I’ll be him in the dark. Call me by his name if it helps. Anything, Pete. Anyone, I’ll be anyone you need.”

Only Peter’s full-bodied grief answers. “Nathan…”

“Here.” Nathan enfolds him, strong, stable, Peter’s gravity force once again. “Hush. You’ll make it through.”

“I’m so tired...”

“Shhh. It kills you when they die, I know. I know, Pete. Hang on to me.”

“I’ve been trying to get us out…” He is five, a howling pit of misery near a capsized bike; he is fifteen and a yellow taxi vanishes down the main alley; he is in a coma, in a blaze, he is nailing down Nathan’s ghost only he’s not, he is the eternal loser. Or is he? There is someone holding him now. “To find a way out, and I can’t… I don’t… I’m not sure how much longer I can do it.”

He chokes, his cheeks burning under the salt until Nathan touches them with his mouth, blowing soft air. “You don’t have to do this alone,” he says. 

“No,” Peter feels his eyes slide close from the exhaustion. “I don’t.”

The kiss on his eyelids is firm, a caress and a command before Nathan pulls back a little. Peter opens them at once. “No,” he says again.

Slowly, Nathan begins to lower his tee. “...All right.”

“Not yet,” Peter clarifies. “First, we wait a bit. It has to be you, Nate.”

He lies down and Nathan stretches himself against him, their arms and legs tangled, until there isn’t a part of them left alone. Sleep washes over them, not quite the black-out; lulling them in and out of consciousness, while the Arizona sky pales above them, then colours up in flamingo pinks and oranges, carded across the long distance from the east. Five, and the day turns noisy: the crows’ salute to the sun; a rumble of tires on the distant thruway; the clack and judder of a metal gate, as Sean brings the café back to life. The early sun hovers at roof-level.

Peter licks his mouth and kisses Nathan’s alert.

“Now,” he says.


	6. Chapter 6

Their lovemaking is very simple. To the peeping sun, it must look a mere outline of what it was before.

But it brings them level in a new, never-before way. One that has Peter’s eyes glisten up, butterscotch brown, as he lets Nathan take the lead. And Nathan towers over him gently while Peter arches up, offers his neck, his chest, takes Nathan’s touch to all the secret places where it will leave his body flushed and consoled.

“Take it slow,” he whispers when his nipples are kissed, Nathan’s dark head bowed as he sucks one, then the other between his lips, worries them with the tip of his tongue, pulls back to blow a haze of warmth over their wet, sensitized flesh. Peter _babbles_ at the sensation. “Nathan, ah, Nathan. So good, Nathan. Please, I,” his words melting under his breath, “Please, don’t let me… I don’t wanna come yet.”

His brother nods, shifting his hand to stroke lower inside Peter’s thigh, intent on finally doing right by him. On being Nathan. Take _doing_ from Nathan, Peter realizes with a sudden pang, and you might as well take Nathan from himself. The lies, the iron roleplay, the sharp suits and V.I.P. suites, the power and the glory? They were never what Nathan truly wanted. Means to an end, yes. But the end – Peter trusts and believes with all his soul – was only ever  _do or die_. And they all took advantage of this. At one point or another, they all used Nathan’s true motto to lasso him into their fucked-up scenarios.

Even their father’s ghost.

Even Peter.

He slips two fingers under the scarred chin, coaxes up Nathan's rumpled face. “I’m so glad,” Peter begins, then he has to stop.

They’re still kissing when Nathan strokes his palms down Peter’s cheeks, half-cupped, then pulls back. He parts his legs open, glances once more at Peter. When he rubs Peter’s tears onto them, adding his own saliva, Nathan’s inner thighs gleam under the sun. Slippery, an open invitation for Peter’s cock that becomes a shelter – _oh_ – when Nathan closes them again and wraps his arms around Peter.

“Move” – haltingly, erasing the gap of years, all grief gone, rocking them into a tighter unit. Like their first time, only different. New. Beautiful. “Pete, almost there. Work with me?”

They work at one, slow at first, groping for coordination. Then faster, as the pleasure clouds up in their bellies. Peter cries out but holds back, clings to the moment, until Nathan whispers “Let _go_ ” and clenches his thighs mercilessly.

The sun is in Peter’s eyes when he comes, casting his climax in white-hot gold.

He must have passed out. Or he wouldn’t be lying in Nathan’s arms, dragged back from limbo with long touches and low, urgent words: “...tell me anything, all right? Peter?”

“Yes,” Peter says. Somebody must have died, or something, because his buzz is shapeshifting, morphing into a more familiar vertigo as the sun dulls in his eyes. The grip of Nathan’s hand is fading, too, and Peter struggles to mouth back comfort. “I’ll tell you last night,” he calls out, a promise and a purpose, and a farewell too, a moment before he gives in to the night tide.

 

* * *

 

Nathan pauses, one arm still looped around Angela’s shoulders. “Er… that my seat, Pete.”

“He swapped the plates,” Claire explains while Peter coaxes their mother out of the loop, holding the chair for her until Angela’s knees are neatly tucked under the table. She looks at him in silence, her face made tender with exhaustion, then turns it to her new vis-a-vis.

“We gotta talk,” Peter tells Nathan under cover of Noah’s kindly “Cherry pie, Angela?”

Nathan looks cautious; looks yesterday’s man, ill-shaven and haunted, and Peter touches his wrist carefully. “Step with me outside?”

“Uh, guys.” Poor Claire, caught in a crossfire of in-depth gazing. “Do you need, like, a referee?”

One brother’s ‘No’ slots into the other’s delayed ‘Yeah’, followed by ‘Wait, outside? On the sidewalk?’

“ _No_ ,” Peter says firmly. “Up the stairs, left when you come out. The fire escape, Nate.”

Nathan’s face turns crestfallen at the words, but he walks staunchly enough to the door. Claire is glaring.

“Hello Mr Tactful? After all we’ve been through, all of today, you had to bring that up?”

Peter’s heart clenches on a warm pulse - sweet alpha Claire, her fathers’ true daughter –  and when it swells again, his love grows too, reaches out to the entire scene. A scene known by heart, by now: the little country diner with its vintage music and its black-and-white pictures that Peter could tell apart blindfolded, its patrons, its middle-aged owner. Plump Sean is on his rounds, flapping his apron, and the sight of him triggers a dumb urge in Peter to chase after him and offer his empty hand. Or a friendly tip, segueing from all their trips up- and downstairs: _give quinoa salad a chance, that signed pic of Kris Kristofferson is a collector’s item, rats won’t touch that stuff try cinnamon and baking soda, you should really have that mole checked out_.

But Peter’s top priority has just made it past the door, and Peter runs to catch up with him.

They come to a halt mid-stairs, poised between earth and sky. Peter sits on the edge of the landing platform with a firm tug on Nathan’s arm when his brother hunkers primly on his heels, intent on sparing his ass actual contact with the grubby steel.

“Cozy,” Nathan mutters. “All right, I’m here. What do you want?”

Peter places his hands over his brother’s knees and pivots them sideways, until Nathan has no choice but to face him again.

“You,” he says.

Nathan, lost, wary, waits.

“I need your help. I can’t do without it. And I’m in a hard place, Nate, because you won’t help me if you don’t believe me, and there’s no way I can prove to you that what I say is the truth, so.... what I mean is, um, can you really, really try, not to…” Peter stops, his throat brutally dry.

“Not to be myself for the next minute?” Nathan looks up and sighs. “That was a joke, Pete.”

“Try not to _interrupt_ ,” Peter gripes, and lunges into his story.

 

* * *

 

Nathan starts interrupting inside the third minute. “I believe you,” he says.

“You...do?” Too late, Peter remembers to close his mouth.

Nathan points his finger at him. “Nurse.” He crooks his arm and points at himself. “Attorney. New York’s finest, and they didn’t call me  that for compliment’s sake. So you’d think I knew when a man is fibbing, Peter, all the more when he’s my own brother. Who couldn’t lie to save his life.”

“It’s not my life…”

“Your trial effort? You caved in before the day was over, begging me to forgive you. Which I do, by the way. Of course I believe you. You’re just being – you.” Nathan draws a quiet breath. “Selfless. _Mind_ less. Good, dedicated, brave to the point of idiocy and the truest man I’ve ever known.”

He covers Peter’s hands with his own, which is when Peter finds he is still holding to Nathan’s knees, his oldest lifeline since he was two and putting gravity to its first test. Holding his gaze, too.

“Just, not quite truthful.”

Holding.

“Some truths… are not mine to tell.”

“And their rightful owners won't lay a claim, now we’re changing that future. You know, Dad had a point. You’d have made a half-decent lawyer.”

Peter lets that pass. “Anything about me. This. Us. Anything you want to know, I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

“Acceptable.” And Nathan’s smile says how aware he is of the Petrelli knack for turning the unspeakable into the unspoken. Then, briskly: “Tell me what I _need_ to know.”

 

* * *

 

“...tell Samuels you’re one of us. Next thing I know, you’re off the ground with everyone pulling a gun on you, and I’m… 

“He’s Samuels, now? What happened to Liam?”

“...not looking at them, because I’m looking up. _I look up to you_ , Nate.”

A beat. “Go on.”

 

* * *

 

“We face Sylar alone? Alone and flying? Please tell me that was your idea.”

 

* * *

 

“A _piano_.”

“And then… okay, don’t freak out, but that’s when he kills you. So he can take your place and -” 

“I don’t give a damn what he does or we don’t, I’m gonna do the little punk in if I have to rope in every Special Op. Sweet mother of God. A piano. I’ll show him murder.”

“Erm.” Peter swallows. “About that…”

 

* * *

 

 _Aren’t you gonna talk_ , he nearly says when he’s done and Nathan’s silence is starting to weird him out. The floor is his, well, the rickety platform branching out where the stairs open onto the rooms, but Nathan only watches Peter, his deep-carved eyes and mouth intense with meaning.

Peter sighs. “This is when you give me hell, right? For not coming to you in the first place.”

“In the first time,” Nathan edits wryly, then adds, “No. This is when I give thanks, if anything.”

“Don’t. I’ve made a complete mess of -”

“You’ve made it clear I was still worth saving. In your eyes.”

Peter reviews _I've cried my eyes out until they felt like Tabasco sauce, then I've taken a crash-course_ \- ha - _in planes and dropped a thousand feet for you, no wings Mom, oh and thrown up on Bennet’s parachute, and then I’ve kissed your coffin in full Pentagon view, tried suicide by Peter, gone to hell_ and _come back, how’s that for losing you?_ _Now do something before my ass dies on me next_.

He settles for a pat on Nathan’s cheek. Something brushes his as Peter leans forward. A night moth, adrift in the night air. It won’t be long before their sanctum is mobbed by a louder presence: down below, Claire must be cheering for truth and dare.

“How long?” Nathan asks, reading him.

“To save the day? Until tomorrow night, eight fifteen. If I’m right.”

“You’re always right. No, don’t get up. Tell me what next.”

Peter blinks in synch with the moth's flitting. “We...go home? Evacuate that building? Turn that new leaf?”

“Not that, dummy. Tell me what happens after I die.”

“But I’ve told you!” Peter frowns, vexed at the new gap between them. “We bury you. It’s a beautiful day, a _blue_ day, and everyone’s here. The Navy is here, Claire is here, and I give the eulo…”

Nathan’s kiss takes him by surprise, a warm press of lips to his cheek.

“This isn’t about me. Pete… we have to think as strategists. What you’ve done so far is take everything you know about the next hours and work it in your favour. Clever, but not good enough. Not with a Sylar. So we need a bigger picture. You’ve spent weeks, months that are still a blank page to him. There has to be something in them we can use as payoff. A trick. Or an ally.”

An ally? He’s tried that, but... “I’ve spent them all alone.”

“Alone’s no good for me, Pete.” Another, lighter kiss. “At any given time. Come on, man. Work with me?”

Peter bites his underlip. Emma, yes, but he doesn’t want to involve her. Emma has her own battlefield of silence and solitude, and he won’t decoy her into his. Not when the last time  he saw her, her fingers bruised and crushed to a pulp...

“...Pete?”

 

* * *

 

“It could work. Really! I mean, it’s _earth_. Sylar digs elemental, but I bet you even he can’t rock something like that. I did, and, Nate, it’s tremendous. Out of Jules Verne. Why didn’t I think of it before? At the very least, we could bulldoze him out of harm... long enough... for me...”

“What?” Nathan asks when Peter’s excitement peters out.

“I forgot,” Peter says glumly. “Not gonna work.”

“Why not? It's not like you never fought him before. All right, for ten minutes, but that stuff’s like riding a bike for you. Total recall. You’re the best of us, you know that? All we have to do is locate this Sullivan, make it so you take his ability....”

“Not gonna work. He was only powerful when he was with the others. He...”

“What others?” Nathan is in full prosecutor swing, all _Now isn’t it true that_ and _Can you describe the individual_ , and Peter feels a twinge of empathy for every mafia boss unfortunate enough to have stood at his bar. “Can you describe the individuals?”

The frustration has Peter stamp his foot. That, and his legs are getting numb. “I’m telling you! He, Sullivan, he was the chief carnie. The others had powers too and he was using them, _sucking_ their powers to fuel his, and I was sort of saving them when this thing happened…”

“Holy crap,” Nathan says. He is looking at Peter much as he used to when they made love before, in times not to be recalled. It makes Peter ache, and it makes his voice brusque when he asks in turn, “What?”

And Nathan smiles, his eyes filled with relief, joy and that strong pulse that Peter once checked at its very source, kissing Nathan’s heart.

“You,” comes next. “Dozens, hundreds of people with abilities, and all you ever see are the victims. While I…”

Peter faces him. “While you…?”

“I see a voluntary task force,” Nathan says, jutting his chin. _Like before, only something new_. He stands up and holds his hand out, waiting to haul Peter up at his side. Peter lets him, grimacing as the blood floods his legs again.

“Gimme a minute?”

“We have a schedule to meet.” But they hover in their stairs sanctum, their hands still linked. “So,” Nathan says. “This Sullivan. What’s he like?”

“Tall. Dark. Wants to be somebody.” Peter grabbing the ramp startles the butterfly off its perch. It flits up and away, steered to the invisible roof above their heads. Peter forces himself to look ahead. “Has a brother problem.”

“ _Plus ça change_ ,” Nathan says, but keeps one hand on Peter’s shoulder all the way down.

 

* * *

 

“...and so of course somebody had to say something,” Claire concludes under Noah’s and Angela’s defeated gaze. “But now you know the truth, you’re not allowed to run off on your own. Because the real test of honor isn’t how you die, it’s how you live. What? I learnt a thing or two in that comic book store.”

“More than she did at school,” Noah murmurs.

“Also, Dad ate your burger.”

“It’s all right, honey. I have a plan.” Nathan stops midway through pie-jacking Noah’s plate. “We. We have a plan.”

But their plan meets with a hitch when it comes to locating the Sullivan Bros and their carnival. Peter plays his Kristofferson trump and cashes a loan of Sean’s laptop, to no avail. No Joseph and/or Samuel on Google, no posters, no leaflets, reviews or lease of ground, nothing an open and honest search bar might display. It’s as if the carnival’s name – big enough to take pride of place in Central Park –faded out the moment it was spelled black on white.

“If I may?” Noah adjusts his glasses and tugs the laptop to him.  “You have to know which side of the bush to poke when tracking down a... special customer. Now, this gentleman is in the circus profession. And while he and his people may be on an invisible ink diet, their audience is not. If their numbers are as spectacular as you say...”

“Also, there’s Instagram,” Claire reminds the world.

Ten minutes and a Boolean rush later, Noah has cross-referenced eleven blogs, all gushing about their night out in the shadows of the sideshows, all located in…

“It’s the Sullivan show you guys want?” Sean, setting the coffee pot down, peers over Noah’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“They’re at Guadalupe,” another patron chimes in. “Old sage field outside the town. There’s a bus round the corner will take you direct – ”

“We’ll go by car,” Peter says.

 

* * *

 

Once inside the Petrelli car, Nathan turns the backseat into an office extension and spends most of the trip saying “sir” into his phone. The number, it turns out, is the only one in the sweet land of American liberty whose calls in or out cannot be traced, not through any neglect of National Intelligence, but because its owner is the most tech-savvy POTUS to date.

“We can have all of the south lawn,” Nathan reports, “as long as we don’t sink the tennis court”. He coughs a bit after the next words. “And I am to, ah, give Ma Hiram’s love.”

“As always. With no chance of his ever putting words to action.”

“ _Ma_!”

“They say sixty is the new forty,” Angela says, ignoring Peter’s wary look. Peter has known her and loved her too long not to know that pert tone for what it is. Once again, his mother is a Woman with a Plan.

But the show lights are filling their windshield, the poor man’s pearls and rubies hanging low from the sky, over the happy growl of the carnival. The Ferris wheel looms at the back like a wink at Peter; a wink and a pang, not quite hope, or fear, more like nostalgia - as if the present he’d left behind suddenly waved to Peter, having traced him back with its own mysterious compass.

Then Nathan taps him on the shoulder, and Peter’s attention swings to his north.

They liaise with Claire and Noah at the entrance. Plodding his way through the gaudy, hot-buttered air, Peter is reminded of Theseus in the maze. Turn left, rinse, repeat: find the center of the labyrinth, and surely Samuel will be there, tugging on his puppet strings? But there is no center in a carnival, only illusory guidance as the crowd herds itself in and out of the booths, spreading every way at once. They nearly lose Claire to an ebb of noisy teenagers, and Peter is close to sensory overflow when the crowd parts and his tunnel vision jumps ahead to a group of people. They're standing at the end of a dark alley, around a small fire, a large van in the background.

One of the men turns as they come, his features sharpened by the firelight. Peter sees a dark tuft of hair and a sullen, inquisitive face. The man returns his look, and the earth gives a tiny wobble under Peter’s feet.

“That’s him,” he says as Noah and Claire catch up, hand in hand. “What do we do?”

“Find Joseph, distract Samuel.” Nathan, ever the strategist. “This is not a conversation we want him spying on.”

“I can drink him under the table? Trailer? Line’em up, fifty cents a hit, last man standing takes all. Where do they keep the booze?”

“Claire-Bear...” Noah turns to Nathan, who is fiddling with an absent tie knot. “Is that what they teach in _Batman_ these days?”

Meanwhile, Angela has stepped forward. “Oh,” she says with a touch of surprise. “That Samuel? The Wheelers’ Sam? Leave him to me.”

Peter feels a light cuff at the back of his head. Before he can protest, his mother’s voice fills it, left behind while the rest of her walks up to the line of fire. _The help’s son, dear. One tended to bump into him at bridge nights, following young Vanessa like a newborn chick. Lorelei’s eldest, the blonde. I rather favored her for Nathan, but we_ _had_ _a family dreamer already and Arthur thought Heidi more photogenic_. _Look  3 o’clock for Joseph._

They watch her slither her way into the carnies' circle, smiling charmingly at Samuel. Samuel looks mesmerized, as does the doddering old man who goes into the trailer to fetch her a chair only to sit on it at her request. It’s all done so fast that when Joseph notices, the takeover is complete and he is blocked in all directions.

Noah calls the first shot, his voice as bland as the faraway muzak. “Good evening, Mr Sullivan. We’re here to talk about Samuel.”

Joseph doesn’t sulk, doesn’t smolder. But his face, under his own thinning hair, takes on a look that is both relieved and guarded.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you are,” Nathan quick-fires. “Is there anywhere we can make our meaning clear?”

“Look,” Peter cuts in. Joseph Sullivan is the saddest man he has ever seen, and Peter isn’t one to leave other people’s sadness alone. “We know you love your brother. Really love him. Even if he’s becoming a liability.”

“You’re dancing over a volcano,” Noah says. “Protecting him and everyone else from himself. We have a solution.”

“I may not look it,” Nathan cuts in, “but I’m a big name in Homeland Security. And I come with a proposal that is in everyone’s interests.”

Joseph Sullivan, carnival man, sad man, haunted man, sweeps his gaze across the fire. His brother is deep in talk with Angela Petrelli, the gist of which cannot be heard because a few of the children are showing Claire the time-honored tradition of pitching crackers into the flames. Samuel’s face is burning with reminiscence.

Joseph sighs. Then he brings his gaze back to Nathan.

  
“Mr Danko,” he says. “Didn’t expect to hear back from you so soon, sir. If you’ll follow me inside, we can make any arrangements you think suitable.”


	7. Chapter 7

The beds are cots, really. Long enough to accommodate another pair of leggy brothers, stingy on the wide side. With just enough room in-between to fit a small desk-cum-bedside table. The window over Peter’s head has a lacy curtainy thing, too frail to block the hum of the feast. A few colored shadows come and go on the trailer’s ceiling. Like New York, the carnival is a city that never sleeps.

And neither does Peter, turning and tossing on the bed, one arm flung across his brow.

The last hour is back with its own parade, its ten-in-one of brilliant flashes. Nathan’s face, the tiny scars on his chin visible when he jutted it and sat straightbacked, tapping into his military past to boost his clever act. No, not quite an act. For Nathan did come bearing gifts: that if Joseph agreed to help, there would be a future where Samuel could move the earth at full throttle and reap a crop of honors. They had sat on the beds, Noah, Peter, Nathan and Joseph, and listened to Nathan speaking of land rehab. Of dry soils waiting to be healed, river beds opened, mountains unlocked, of warscapes, Bosnia, Serbia, Rwanda, Haiti, of a planet shaken and disturbed, and how Samuel and his likes could be the new pioneers, making it into a better world.

Peter remembers speaking too. About letting go, mostly. Letting little brothers come into their own. About love, “more cruel than the grave”, and how it _can_ move past its own hunger, _can_ renounce, _can_ release (a grave nod from Noah) so that a shrunken heart will find new territory for itself.

And Joseph’s face had gradually melted into acceptance. In the end, he was still unsmiling, but he had shaken hands again with all of them and gone to fetch Samuel.

“Getting there,” Nathan whispered in the interval, in Peter’s ear. Peter had smiled. Because, yeah? One more step on time’s invisible tightrope. Squaring the loop. One more pair of brothers brought to peace. Futures, bright as the bulb-lit fair, made possible again.

So why the heck can’t he go to sleep?

 _Because even in your generosity, you are selfish_.

Husky and hard; the voice he used to use on Nathan. And it still hits the mark. Because, yeah, Peter’s glad to see Nathan take responsibility again. Cross his heart.  But it aches, the gladness. Peter knows what he is doing: if this works, if tomorrow works, he is releasing Nathan Petrelli to the big outside world. The next time Peter sees him, Nathan will be in a suit, standing with his arms crossed and his back appropriately to the White House.

On the rooftop, in that closeted, open space between air and earth, they could love each other in any  possible circumstances. Tomorrow, the rest of the world claims them. Tonight, they sleep in divorced beds.

Peter turns over to choke his sigh into his arms.

“You all right?”

“I…” He’d thought Nathan had obeyed his own command to ease up before the battle.

A rustle of sheets, before Nathan holds his arm out in the space between them. Peter copies him, lets their fingers touch; feels Nathan’s fold up against his palm.

“You’re as bad as Bennet,” his brother chides. “Went out for a leak and found him chaperoning Claire at the shooting gallery. If they expect me to fly that stuffed panda all the way to D.C…”

Peter tries to smile. “You tell’em, skyboy.”

Silence falls again, their arms their only connection, stretched over the gap. Peter is trying hard, really hard.

“I love you,” he says, a final struggle into acceptance.

Nathan doesn’t answer.

“I love you,” Peter repeats, and opens his hand.

“Isn’t that our coda when all is said and done?”

“...Yeah.” Peter turns his head to the window and its moveable lights. “And we’re almost done. My big brother will bivouack in the Oval Office this time tomorrow.”

He is half asleep when Nathan has the last word, so that Peter, dozing in and out of consciousness, could swear they’re still on Sean’s roof - and the hum outside is the night breeze being raked through the fields.

“I doubt all has been said, Pete.”

 

* * *

 

Peter, as he says himself, is a vocational early riser. Which does _not_ mean he’s a morning person. It comes as no surprise to him that when he joins a crowded breakfast table, Nathan is already showered, coffee-ed up, and sporting an all button shirt and a tie. The tie is blue.

“There’s another option,” he tells Peter’s pointed glance. “But it’s mustard, and it has sequins on it.”

“Groovy,” Claire mouthes around her frittata.

On the other hand, Nathan’s new wristwatch is orange, plastic, and has Winnie-the-Pooh on its face. Peter guesses this makes him an honorary Bennet and tries to keep his own face straight, while he’s brought  eggs and coffee (“I kept them hot for you!”) by another eager little blonde.

“Better start moving,” Nathan says after consulting with the Pooh. “Zero-hour is noon, when the President summons Target to meet him on his own turf. Target is probably being notified as I speak. We have a few hours to go, but we still need to plan transportation. Where’s Ma?”

From the archipelago of trucks and vans, Bennet can be seen striding up to them, his face stern. “I can’t find her,” he calls out.

Nathan turns to Claire, narrowing his eyes. “She wasn’t with you?”

“They put Dad and I in the souvenir van,” Claire reminds him. “I thought she was, I don’t know, with you?”

“She’s not with anyone. She’s gone.” Bennet takes off his glasses to wipe the sweat from his face. “And no one here has seen her leave.”

“Right.” Nathan’s jaw hardens one more notch. “Okay, here’s what I…”

“You want to take my hand.”

The speaker is a woman whose lanky beauty now appears to Peter as she rises from the communal bench, one hand up the lapel of her dressing-gown. Her voice holds that note of absolute purpose which comes naturally to most women when they oggle most-likely-to Nathan Petrelli.

“I’m fine,” Nathan says hurriedly. But there was no upward tick to the sentence, and the woman is clasping his hand in hers even as she loosens the silky robe down her back and shoulders. Nathan immediately freezes with a once-bitten expression. But the gesture is only voluptuous in the abstract, and the blonde is in fact turning her back on him.

“Oh!” Claire gasps, while Peter nearly falls from the bench.

“That’s her!” “That’s her with…” “Wait, that’s Samuels?” “Still here, pal.” “No, he means Liam Samuels, the President’s…” “What’s he doing with Angela?” “More to the point, what’s Ma doing with him?” Their frame-by-frame comments bump into each other. The carnies watch with deja vu indulgence.

“Wow.” Claire touches her fingertip to the bare and vivid back. At once, the tattoo shrinks into its own ink like a shy octopus, only to bloom again and show a new male face. “That’s _so_ Bradbury.”

“No, that’s Arnold,” says the little girl. Which is Joseph Sullivan’s cue to rise and join their small gathering. Arnold, it turns out, is the old man who was smitten with Angela the night before - and whose courtesy has apparently extended to a space journey free of charge. Joseph shakes his head mournfully at this piece of news. Arnold, he explains, has already one foot in the grave; any strenuous effort such as this is bound to topple him for good.

Peter says “Oh, God” and clutches the table.

But the obliging back displays a peacefully snoring Arnold in the Lincoln Bedroom, followed by a panoramic view of...

“The Capitol,” Nathan enlightens the crowd. “She’s headed for it with Liam. She’s… Holy crap, she’s gone to see Target!” Frantically, one-handedly, Nathan burrows into his suit pocket. “Oh, for... she called him first, Pete.”

“Sylar?”

“Worf,” Nathan barks out. “Yesterday night, while we checked Bennet’s GPS. She must have negotiated a safe-conduct _and_ an escort. What does she think she’s doing?”

“Grounding Sylar,” Peter answers with a twinge of admiration. He lowers his voice. “Making sure he stays put where he is. You know what he’s after. He hates her, but he needs her memories of you for...lack of the real thing. And he won’t try anything if she comes with the President’s envoy. Unless...”

 _Danko_ , he thinks suddenly. Danko, still rabid with pride and distrust, still out for any way to disrepute their family. Danko, now on his way to Senator Petrelli’s office with hatred in his heart and a taser gun. Can he, will he lash out on their mother if she is under State protection? But a Liam is a Liam is only a Liam, and he’s been waylaid before. Peter meets Noah’s eyes, waits until he has Nathan’s gaze and mouthes a silent name.

“...You figure?”

“He hates Mom. She called him out on his colonial past when he tried to put the screws to her.”

“It should have been me.” Claire is inconsolable. “He can’t kill me, and he has a thing for me anyway. What? I didn’t say he had a thing _with_ me. Ugh.”

“I’m going,” Noah says, his tone final. His eyes appraise each brother in turn, deep in calculation, before they rest on Nathan again. “What’s your average payload, Mr Danko?”

“For God’s sake!” Nathan, both hands restored to use, lifts them in frustration. “Why does everyone insist on treating me like an Army Cougar?”

“You don’t need a cougar,” the Illustrated Woman says unexpectedly. “Not when you can have an Edgar.”

The moody man on her left (were all the Sullivans born with a sad long face?) opens his mouth in protest. She smiles at him, lanky, sultry and determined, and Edgar’s mood thaws just a little.

 

* * *

 

“...kept in a room called Human Resources,” Peter says. “Dosage is 8.4%. Quickly does it, then you can shove him into a broom closet or something.”

“Knife’s quicker,” Edgar informs them moodily.

Noah asks, “ _How_ many times exactly did you break into the damn Building?”

 

* * *

 

“No,” Claire tells Nathan. “No way I’m staying here. Or I’ll stay on after everything’s done and over, and you’ll be the one telling Dad it’s an artist’s life for me. So what’s it gonna be?”

 

* * *

 

“Point me right,” Nathan says, and Peter can’t help his smile.

This is a far cry from all his tales of flying with Nathan - the giddy, erotic preludes to their other spins together. But Nathan looks so happy, Claire’s arms around his neck, and he does speak as if the three words held the moral of their tale.

They make up for so much. Starting with the fact that Peter is left to carry the stuffed panda.

 

* * *

 

“How did you know?” Matt asks, shining with a father’s new-born pride. He tosses the bear high in the air, catches it, then pushes it back into Peter’s arms. “Hold it for me, willya? I’m on a rescue mission.”

“High five,” Peter says. Their flats of their palms slap together with a very satisfactory tingle. “Speaking of, would you to do something for me? When you see Hiro...”

 

* * *

 

If he had any trace of hubris left in him, the Greek hero’s one-way ticket to _splat_ , the fight takes care of it. Nathan is already patrolling the battlefield - green field, acres of it, though still technically known as gardens - when Peter shows up at ten to noon. Everyone else is here, save President Worf, hidden from plain sight to play the goat to Sylar’s wolf. Nathan is jogging up from one carnie to the other, saying things like _we have to stick together_ and _remember your position_.

“He always wanted to play football,” Peter tells Claire. “Dad used to say, We’re not the Bronx Petrellis, son.”

“You’re our free safety,” Nathan says to him, and, before he can protest, Nathan points out that the last thing they need is Peter getting mixed in a crowd of multipowered players. “You keep him grounded,” he adds for Claire, which of course is also the best way to keep Claire out of the offensive scrimmage. And so Samuel gets to call the moves, while Peter and Claire watch the game from the sidelines.

The game, fight, offensive, takes all of two minutes. Long enough for Peter to mourn the time when _he_ was the offender, Sylar’s official nemesis, and harsh enough to make him realize that, even at his best, he wasn’t a patch on these guys. One moment Sylar is walking up the south lawn arm in arm with Angela and Samuels, casting half a glance to the knot of motley people strolling on the grass. The next moment, he is mobbed, spun around, earthquaked, pitted and entrenched before he can so much as lift a finger. Peter is close enough to see him freeze in horror when the man called Eli surrounds him with a demonic ring of clones and think, rather vengefully, _maze of mirrors_.

The earth shakes, clods flying bullet-like into every angle. Peter’s nostrils are filled with the mineral scent of clay. When he opens his eyes again, Sylar is buried up to his neck like an off-off-Broadway performance of _Happy Days_ , Peter’s signal to enter the stage. The fighters fall back as he does, sensing the coup de grâce; and Peter, his brain singing with Matt’s unholy gift, walks the line. He knows what he has to do, and, with dead-on precision, where.

His hand on Sylar’s forehead, nurse-executioner, healer and villain, Peter shuts his eyes to the light and visualizes his flat as he last saw it.

The ghost of a kitchen and its empty cupboards.

The bedsheets still twisted with the imprint of Nathan’s desperate night.

The walls stripped to the bone.

An apartment he once painted the dream-blue of night, now lined with shadows. The empty corridor outside its corners, the hollow block, deserted streets, the entire no-man’s world. _Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé._ Peter gave Lamartine the flip in college - Mom and Nathan are the family snobs when it comes to French - but for some reason, the line has stuck.

He looks up at Nathan, soaring above them like an angel-in-command, and Sylar’s chin hits the ground.

 

[A/N: “Only one person missing, and your whole world is bereft of people.” Alphonse de Lamartine, _L’Isolement_.]

 

* * *

 

“Well done, Petrelli,” President Worf says. Angela hangs on his arm, the two of them the only immaculate spectators. “And Petrelli. And here, I guess, is the young man who will make geography so we can make history?”

Samuel smiles back, and Peter wonders if Nathan has just been out-sharked. Difficult to say, when dust is still clogging the air and his attention is being decoyed by a shrill cry of happiness. Hiro is standing before him, his face still too pale for Peter’s liking but blessedly clear of blood. Matt has been half successful, Peter sees: Hiro is still unconvinced that he and Destiny should end up in an ER bed.

Then Hiro spots Sylar’s head at his feet, and his eyes widen.

“Old Yakuza tradition,” Ando explains, while Hiro spouts a flow of concerned Japanese. “Yakuza Big Daddies set up a game of bowling, but with the enemies’s heads instead of tenpins. Hiro would like to say, this is not a dignified death.”

“I can go fetch my sword?” Hiro offers.

“Don’t bother,” Peter says, just as Nathan lands before them in a flourish. The air fills at once with more than dust, until Hiro utters a bland “Nathan Petrelli” and Nathan’s face falls at the correct use of his name. But then Hiro bows, saying “Today, you fly high”, and Nathan bows back, lower than he ever did for Boo Vanderbilt.

“Darlings.” Suddenly Angela is among them, dropping a peck on each filial cheek. “So glad everything has turned for the best. Nathan, I’m taking Claire home for a little tidy-up. And here is… one of us?” She waves aside Peter’s introduction, peers at Hiro in silence. “Your father would be proud of you,” comes next. “And he was a difficult man to please, as I know all too well. Give me your arm, Hiro Nakamura; I’m giving you a lift to the hospital.”

Hiro’s cheeks quaver a little, but his exit is nothing if not dignified.

“Claire,” Nathan says. “Before you leave, I want you to meet your father’s oldest friend.”

“Miss… Claire,” Liam Samuels echoes with apt diplomacy. Peter has to admire the man: nothing will faze him out of his prep-boy suavity, not even the killer currently breathing on his shoelaces. “It’s great to meet you. You must forgive me if I put your dad on temporary House arrest: for us old men, it’s parley time now.”

And the lawn, indeed, is emptying itself as the President issues an open invite to talk and luncheon, and people fall into step. The carnies leave in a body, trading thumps and ribald debriefs. Matt goes after a long, thoughtful look at the unconscious Sylar, a squeeze to Peter’s arm, a mental _And I thought I was the one up for congrats_. Claire gives them a radiant thumbs-up and trots up to Angela. The last mote of earth settles down. Soon, there will be only Peter and his charge left to loiter on the lawn-turned-tumulus.

“I ought to stay,” Nathan says, looking at Peter.

Peter nods his love, shakes his no. “I’ll be fine. You go keep some peace, Nate.”

“Is there anything we should do? Anyone we should send over? I can summon a bodyguard…”

“You can summon a granola bar.” Peter lowers himself onto a knoll of fresh grass, a few paces away from Sylar. “Thanks, Liam. But for this, I have to be alone.”

  
He draws his knees up to his chest, wraps them in his arms and wonders if he should have asked for a cushion too. It’s going to be a long five hours.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The fic is now officially a fix-it, and the author thanks y'all for riding this ride to the end!)

As things turn out, Peter’s wake is broken along with Peter’s fast.

It lacks a quarter to the first hour when Angela re-enters in a French bun and a pleated cotton dress, heading a caravan of waiters. One is carrying a sunshade which he opens with fastidious care over Sylar’s head. Then lawn chairs, a folding table, white linen, cushions, sandwiches, mango trifle and a carafe fogged with white cold mist. Peter blinks gratefully: the July sun is at its peak, cranking up an August heat.

“A granola bar,” his mother says, her bun rigid with disapproval. “Really, Peter, what next? A blue-plate special before you tackle Armaggedon?”

Peter waits until the last underling has shown them his heels. “I thought you'd gone home.”

“I thought you could do with a tip.” Angela’s face softens into a smile. “And a little company.”

Peter grins back at the lower-case. “ _Family_ , Mom.”

“Eat.” She gives the sandwich plate a quarter turn to the left. “These are tofu and watercress. And drink. You’re a natural, but something like this will take all of your strength.”

Peter knows better than to drink iced water on an empty stomach or ask how she knows. He is, after all, his father’s son; their genetic thread stretching on after every other tie was slashed, invisible but strong enough that Peter could ground Sylar’s soul on a trial effort. They eat, and he thinks of Arthur Petrelli, thinks of a woman’s choices in the late sixties, of love turning to a confinement room, of sinners and second chances.

Then she leans sideways, beckoning him, and he starts.

“The trick is this,” she says. “Don’t hole yourself up with him. Draw a door in your mind, giving access to his; make sure it opens on your side only. Talk to him as long as you need, then tell the door to shut you out. Your father was a dab hand at this.”

Peter bends over her, her creased forehead.  Her door is a gate, he is shown, tall and regal, its ironwork forged and twisted until the design hides every space between the bars, blinds every sight. It creaks slowly open at his touch.

_Why?_

That lock comes with so many keys that he won’t, he tells himself, hold it against her if she keeps mum. But she answers. She speaks as she writes and acts: bold strokes, even in confession.

_I was so young and I wanted so hard to be strong. My first love was taboo, his caring a freak show in the eyes of the world. The world was sick. The world owed me for Charles and Alice, and the debt had to be settled on my terms. But how could I cure the world if it only saw me as a pariah?_

Peter strokes the sinuous, sharp-edged metal with his palms.

 _He told me that in the end, love was all that mattered. I think he was thinking of you_.

_Not just me. Charles was a clairvoyant. He saw me want it all - the love, the strength, the sway, the pride - and took a step back. Then I met Arthur, and forty years later I stood by him in a red dress while the world raised its cup to us. I thought of him as my pillar, last man standing after our love washed over the world in a red-hot flood, and he stood by me and thought how he’d burn his first-born to a crisp._

_Mom…_

_Sometimes, for some of us, taboo's right. Taboo shelters us, Peter._

_Mom, why are you telling me this?_

She pulls back, her face upturned to look him in the eye. Peter can hear the gate clang shut. “Off  with you, now. If the deed were done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly.”

“Will you…” Suddenly, Peter feels very young. “Will you stay with me?”

But she is on her feet, handing out fluid caresses down the front of her dress. “I’ll send Noah to you in a few hours. He’s still in Building 26, dealing with the slow side of of business. He...” An almost-snag in her voice. “He was very efficient when Mr Danko chose to make a _partie carrée_ this morning.”

“Noah would slap Death in the face for you, Mom. He’s a strong man.”

Her smile is wistful as she pats his own stubbled cheek. “And a family man, dear. Let’s not add venial to my mortal sins.”

She is standing against the sunburnt sky, her face hawk-like and brittle at once, as only her face can be.

“I will keep you in my thoughts, Peter. Both of you.”

 

* * *

 

 

The strong man turns up at five, armed with two shovels and a wry “What the hell is it with Petrellis and digging?”

“Hell, hell, hell, hell,” Sylar croaks decrescendo. Five years on mustard and water have left him a groggy penitent, although Peter was careful to keep him in the shade. “Hello, Noah.”

“Mr Bennet to you.” Noah hands Peter a shovel and shrugs his jacket off. “And I still say you and the free world would be better off in separate living quarters.”

Fair enough, Peter thinks. Sylar’s refractory periods are notoriously short-lived.

“Oh, this feels good,” the designated patient sighs once he can move his fingers again. Noah’s grip turns deadly on the wooden handle, but Sylar only takes a dig at the earth. He casts a blurry eye on his Samaritans. “But dirty. I feel...soiled.”

“Well, I’m not taking you home for a tidy-up. Plenty of accommodation in Building 26 for the time being, including a nice bedtime toddy.” Noah shrugs, turns to Peter. “Can your mother keep Claire for the night? I’d better keep an eye on Mr Groundhog here.”

“Gabriel,” Sylar says with a plaintive gaze. “My name is Gabriel. I have killed off the old man with his deeds.”

“Whatever.” But Noah remains standing, considering the empty grave. Only Peter catches the swift gesture when he locks his left hand into his right, twists it and prises his fingers loose. There is a flash of gold, and, when Peter looks again, a single ring of metal lying in the wreckage. Bennet shifts his grip to Sylar.

“Aquagrill,” Peter blurts out, beating second thoughts by a nose. “Oysters or salmon, yellow fin tuna. Not yellowtail, that’s Nathan. She loves a bottle of Vouvray.”

Bennet pauses, the flash on his face now, confused by hope. “I...” For the first time since a year ago at Odessa, Peter finds himself facing a _very_ grateful man. Though apparently too baffled for words.

But Noah did not rise to top Company rank by letting bafflement have one over him. He turns to go, dragging the reformed Sylar by the arm. A few paces on, he looks over his shoulder and gives Peter a smile that Claire would recognize as a long-standing friend.

“I’ll send Nathan to you soon as we’re done.”

 

* * *

 

The five o’clock sky is cloud-coloured, stretched out in electric greys over his head. This is the latest Peter has seen it yet, the farthest his loops have let him out, and Peter himself is lying on the ground as if his weight could tilt the planet’s axis straight into night. But the clouds are fringed with a light that hits Peter’s tender eyelids as he closes them, lets go of exhaustion with every breath out. He is floating between light and clouds when a new shadow falls on the grass.

“Hey.” A hand pushing under his flop of hair, sticky with grit and sweat. “Wake up, Dusty Hoffmann.”

First, Peter lets the caress run its course. “...there yet?,” he yawns, rolling over and up to sit on his knees.

“Pretty close. Man, ain’t nobody better die before I’ve grabbed a shower. I’m…”

Tie-less, brown-torsoed under the gaping V of his shirt, the sweat brilliant on his face as he tries to frown it away and laughs across the frown. _Like today. Unique. Unrepeatable_.

“…a yahoo,” Nathan says, oblivious to Peter’s soliloquy. “A total and complete yahoo, who still owes you.”

 _My Na_ – Peter snaps out of his thoughts. “Uh, no. You owe me nothing, buddy.”

“Oh, but I do. And I’m a man of my word, warts and all. I suppose you’ll insist on a veggie kebab?”

Peter blinks.

“Dinner,” Nathan prompts him. He leans into their space, his own earthy musk undeterred by Samuel Sullivan’s cheap cologne. “My treat. Remember? Not taking a rain check here, Pete.”

“Oh…” And Peter gasps, struck by the light of lessons and parallels. Too late, he remembers to close his mouth. Then opens it again. “Ummm, speaking of …”

For lightning has struck for good, and the rain is vivid and everywhere. It stomps the grass and lifts the dust from its precocious rest, and it drenches the brothers as they jog up the lawn. Peter stops to spin and whoop, free-wheeling in the mud, angling his head back to catch some of the water in his mouth: child or man, Peter has always loved a good rain. Nathan shouts, points at a tree bordering the lawn. Laughing, clutching each other, they stumble through the last soggy yard. The tree is a Japanese maple, a slender dome of greens and pastel yellows, but its crooked branches do not an umbrella make.

“Here,” Nathan says, drawing Peter into his arms as they huddle against the trunk.

Whimsical, summer-light, the rain fades and lashes out in turn. Peter pulls back enough to shake the freshwater out of his eyes. His sight back into focus, he can make out a tall structure on his left, bisected by a net and lined on one side with a few high chairs painted white.

“Did you?” Nathan pushes back his damp hair, plastered to his forehead by the rain. Soft-gestured, soft-voiced. “Did you really do this? Every night, against every odd? On and on and again, make sure I wouldn’t die? Did you love me that much?”

He nods into Nathan’s shoulder, peeps over it at the soaked tennis court.

“Then I win.” Nathan bends his face. “Pete, whatever happens now, I win. You know that?”

“In a landslide,” Peter says, his voice shaky with a true dream’s joy.

 

* * *

 

They end up at Luigi’s, a 24/7 trattoria that has served Peter well in his work hours.

Peter expected Amélie’s, because Nathan can be a class-A snob about his French _and_ his food. But Nathan seems content to sit at a corner table and drink a casual red, while Peter binges on eggplant and artichoke dipped in golden, silky oil. “No cheese,” he tells Luigi when the latter sidles up to them with the parmesan grinder.

The place is only half filled with other early diners, their talk idle, making it easy for Nathan’s whispers to blend in. He tells Peter a little about the “slow side of business”: the press secretary’s announcement of a gas rupture under the White House grounds, the President’s offer of the first reclaimed parcel in America as a communal land for Samuel and his peers, with more to come.

“Utopia?” Peter has to ask twice through his antipasti. “Specials Without Frontiers? Seriously?”

Nathan shrugs. “Keep Your Allies Closer, more like. Sullivan is no fool, but neither is Worf. The best go-to for now is a balance of powers between _them_ and _us_. Meaning that more people will have to know, not everyone, not yet, but more.”

“More?”

“The Company was a mistake because it was a monolith.” Nathan leans over to steal a piece of Peter's garlic bread. “Going public, well, I know Claire would love that, but it’s gonna do more harm than good unless Joe Public believes hook, line and DNA that he might be special too. Or his sons and daughters. Until then, we’ll have to make sure there are people on the watch for the next Sylar... and watchmen for the people on the watch. Look, Pete.”

And, just like that, Nathan begins to change the world - using bread pellets and toothpicks.

“Insiders in Washington. Peking. Amsterdam. Undercover lobbies, ready to come out at a moment’s notice, liaising with heads of State and…”

Peter grabs his brother’s wrist before Nathan can cast the salt shaker as Pope Francis. “...You?”

Nathan glances up, his face unperturbed. “No. The last thing I did before I went to fetch you was to hand Worf my resignation.”

“Nathan!”

“I had to ask him for a sheet of paper. You’ll be glad to hear it had the Statue of Liberty as a watermark.”

“I never wanted that for you.” A shaken Peter meets with a doubtful stare, only to shake with more, heart-deep emotions. “No! In the end, I didn’t! Nate…”

“Hush. Lower. It’s not a matter of what you want.” Nathan sets the salt down, pushing his elbows onto the table. “Peter, I had to get a ten-year-old’s help to be elected.”

“What are you -”

“And I only made it to Senator because Dad was an ace with smoke and mirrors. It’s no good, Pete. I can’t make it on my own, because I know how to punish, how to bring down, but I have no idea how to reassure. You do. Perhaps you’ll be the Face of Evolution one day, and I’ll stand behind you and cheer every word you say because they _will_ be yours. Mine were a pat on the head and a glass of warm milk, Ma’s order for the trusting crowds. No wonder the polls never took off.”

When Peter sits frozen-faced, lost even to the appeal of grilled tomato, Nathan kicks him lightly under the table. “It’s called a price, buddy. I’m told that it usually comes with a choice.”

But Peter doesn’t rise to the bait.

“Pete.” His ankle is brushed again, the touch patient, slower, not a rebuke. “Just because I'm choosing my penance, it doesn’t mean I’ll be without a purpose. I can’t promise I’ll be a saint in the future, but… I’ll do my best. If you'll help.”

This finally earns the speaker a smile. “I’m good with your best, Nate.”

“And it means I can give Heidi a proper divorce. With me out of the light, she and the boys will stand a better chance of escaping scrutiny.” Nathan’s answering smile grows serious. “The dark… can make a few things clearer.”

“I know,” Peter tells him. “I’ve had thirty nights to find out, Nate.”

He doesn’t look at Nathan’s watch, taken off its owner’s wrist and laid out on the paper cloth at the start of their meal. Neither does Nathan. Their table is close to the door, left ajar, and the South Village noises mark the passing of time well enough: the passers-by’s shouts, phone rings, the rattlesnake of traffic on Sixth Avenue, the city dogs barking at the failing light. The evening rolls on in deep, pacified blues.

Nathan is tugging at Peter’s gaze. “Thirty nights?”

“Give or take.” Because the loop could still be cruel rather than kind; could still take it all back and reset the clock at the night before, no matter what. _What_ being a whole day without a death, a white round pebble in the gods’ arena. Still...

“Anything else you found out?” Nathan's gaze is deeper, goldbrown.

Peter picks up the watch and places it on his wrist. Then holds his arm out, waiting for Nathan’s fingers to fasten the tie like a pledge. _I don’t care_ . Together, they look at the open angle of the hands. Ten past eight. _I don’t care if it’s you on the other side, Dad, with your black smoke and mirrors. Or if it’s You. I’m taking this, okay? I’m taking it, and I’m making it_ our _truth. Make of it what you will_.

He scrunches his eyebrows and focuses for a few seconds before raising his head and his voice.

“Lots. As starters, that I’m in love with Nathan Petrelli.”

He smiles at the flash-still of wide, startled eyes before Nathan gets it. The gentle patter of voices around them is just the same. Everyone smiling. No one gasping or gaping, no one checking their corner in outrage. Nathan starts laughing, and Peter opens his hands, then spreads them upward in an extravagant curve, as if lifting all these lovely, inattentive people and offering them to Nathan as their witnesses. “I’m in love,” he tells the room. “With this man. And he’s in love with me, and I love and thank him for it. And we’ve...” Peter stops, uncertain.

“ _Pete_ ,” Nathan says, his eyes brimming with life unshed. The sight chokes Peter's breath away. “Pete, I know. All of yesterday, I’ve…  God, I knew the minute you sat me down on these goddamn stairs.”

He finds Peter’s legs again under the table, coaxes them against his. Strong thigh muscles push their advantage, until Peter’s knees are eased apart and Nathan is slipping between them, tightening their secret embrace. “You knew?” Peter says.

“You touched me,” Nathan murmurs. “That's when I saw it. It was all over you, that sweet sunny glow that bodies have on them after they’ve made love with all their soul. Y’know?”

Peter thinks of sunrise, of Nathan's strong thighs gleaming in the light. “Yeah,” he whispers back. “I know.”

“I saw it on Mer, eighteen years ago. So clear, I told her. So beautiful. And yesterday, I saw it again.”

“And you didn't freak out.” Not a question: all of Nathan’s behavior yesterday carries its own glow, leaving Peter humbled in retrospect.

“No. I used to, but… not now. Not when I’ve seen what it can make me do.”

Peter’s heart blossoms at the verb.

“These last months.” Nathan’s smile widens, the real thing, not the toothy simulacrum on a four-figure photograph. “Nothing felt real. Like I was running along a corridor only to meet with the end and run back to another dead end. You know?”

“Yeah,” Peter whispers. “I know.”

“Finding that I had… made love to you, made _you_ shine, not that you need any help in that quarter...” Nathan pauses to look around, not in fear or caution, rather to let the copper-amber reality of the cantina wrap his next words. “There it was, all over you. God, Pete, you _strained_ with it. And I’d given it you - I myself. And like that, Pete, just like that, it was as if you’d broken through and pulled me right out of the wire-cage.”

“I’m glad, Nate.”

“Me too. But, Peter.” Nathan raises a hand, then a finger, his old prime-time shtick. “It’s not gonna be every day tonight.”

“Better not!”

“No, what I mean is… for one thing, we’ll have to keep this _sub rosa_. Like the rest.”

Peter Petrelli thinks that if they are turning the world upside down, with gravity, decay and DNA blueprints falling out of its pockets, perhaps a few tribal laws can be persuaded to levitate. Perhaps. Still, early days.

“Yeah.”

Nathan adds a finger. “Claire must never know.”

 _Claire mustn’t be told_ , Peter amends for himself.  “Course.”

“Sometimes, the fights take us apart. We talk about them first, always, we get together and weigh the pros and cons. But in the end, I let you take your road. You do the same. And we find each other at the end.”

“You know you only have ten of these, right? ”

“If. Pete, listen to me. _If_ at any time I die on our road, you - ”

Peter sets his fork down and reaches across the table, trapping Nathan’s fingers in his own. He lowers his head to give them a kiss. “No.”

The negotiator holds his silence longer than Peter would have given him credit for. More couples are coming in, thrilled at the prospect of _pane, amore_ and a summer night’s _fantasia._ Nathan-aged men, Peter-aged girls, humming a bar of Pink Martini just as - “You and your hard bargains,” Nathan sighs. But his smile is back.

“At least you’re honest about it. You always are, it’s what makes it so tempting and so terrible to fall for you. You’re everything true, Pete.”

“I’m…not,” Peter says. He squeezes their fingers for reassurance, feels Nathan copy his move under the table. A childhood scene gatecrashes his mind unbidden: Mom taking him to confession, to the dark nook that smelt of souls and beeswax, clutching a list of sins in a child’s round-cheeked writing.

 _Plus ça change_. But this is Nathan he is confessing to, and their nook is warm and surrounded with life, beautiful ordinary life, and Nathan himself is saying, “Tell me.”

“Up there, when we made love, I… I wasn’t honest with you.” Peter swallows. “I didn’t want to tell you, because the last time I - because it scared the bejesus out of me. What might happen if I got you involved. Only, it wasn’t fair. Because, I... Nathan, I remembered everything we’d done together, every touch, every moment, but you couldn’t. Didn’t. For you it was the first time, every time.”

He forces himself to watch the truth as it flows into Nathan’s eyes.

“... How many times?” Quiet, too quiet.

“I’ve lost count,” Peter says miserably. “I hope you can forgive me.”

“Jesus Christ, Pete!” Nathan draws a raggedy breath. “This is... I must have been the _lousiest_ lover on the Pacific Coast!”

“You…” Peter prises a hand free, but only so he can cup his brother’s cheek, a counter-move to Nathan’s downcast tilt of the head. Peter holds fast, but Nathan won’t look up. “Oh, sweetheart. Close your eyes.”

The door swings open at his touch.

There is no need for words, not even pictures. Only the bold, burning pleasure of their last time together, poured from his mind straight into Nathan's; only the memory of his breath coming and going with Nathan’s thrusts until his orgasm spilled out in life, endless life, and tears, and the sun in his eyes, and Nathan’s name in his mouth until Nathan himself answers it, presses it back to Peter’s lips like a seal.

Peter opens his mouth, keeps his eyes closed. They kiss hurriedly, fervently, Nathan’s full mouth covering his, past blindfolded by present, present moist, moaning, vibrant, the Village revelers’ happy sounds in their backs.

When Nathan lets them resurface for a suck on air, Peter opens his eyes and searches his face, but all Nathan does is point silently down.

Peter looks at Nathan. Nathan clasps his wrist.

“Eight twenty,” his brother says, going for casual and sounding twice his usual rasp.

It could be that Peter is shivering. Or it could be the earth, giving one tiny memento cheer under his feet. But when his vertigo clears out, Peter is still in New York, at a table for two, and Nathan is slapping a bill onto the table.

“Time to get you home, traveller.”

Peter thinks of empty rooms with empty cupboards and Sylar’s residual ghost in every shadow.

“Let’s go find a rooftop,” Nathan says. He is in the doorway, framed by the dream-blue night, his arm already crooked and his lips still parted.

Peter smiles, rises, and takes his first step into this new brave new time.


End file.
